Eddy, B. (2012) | References | Narcissus and the Child

What This Research Found

Bill Eddy's BIFF: Quick Responses to High-Conflict People provides a deceptively simple framework that has transformed how survivors, professionals, and institutions manage communication with high-conflict personalities. Drawing on decades of experience as both a licensed clinical social worker and a family law attorney, Eddy identified a fundamental problem: standard communication approaches fail catastrophically with certain individuals, and the harder you try to reason with them, the worse things get.

The BIFF framework offers a solution. BIFF stands for Brief, Informative, Friendly, Firm—four principles that guide every written response to a high-conflict individual. The method recognises that high-conflict personalities are not simply difficult people having a bad day; they have ingrained patterns of all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, extreme behaviours, and preoccupation with blaming others. These patterns often overlap with personality disorders, particularly narcissistic personality disorder and the broader Cluster B category.

Brief means keeping responses short. Two to three sentences maximum. Long responses provide ammunition—every word is something that can be quoted, twisted, or used to continue the engagement. The instinct to explain, defend, and justify produces exactly what the high-conflict person wants: extended engagement and emotional investment. This is precisely why word-salad attacks work—they demand lengthy untangling that extends contact. Brevity denies them material to work with.

Informative means sticking to facts. Necessary information only—schedules, logistics, required data. No emotional content. No opinions. No explanations of your feelings, your reasoning, or your justifications. The high-conflict person is not interested in understanding you; they are interested in defeating you through manipulation and blame-shifting. Information serves necessary coordination; everything else serves their conflict needs.

Friendly means maintaining a cordial tone. Not warm, not cold—professional. "Thank you for letting me know" costs nothing and provides nothing to attack. Hostile responses justify their narrative that you're the problem. Overly warm responses may be perceived as weakness to exploit. Friendly professional neutrality makes you boring and un-attackable.

Firm means ending the conversation. "I'll handle it from here." "No response needed." Clear signals that the exchange is complete. High-conflict individuals probe for openings, questions that must be answered, hooks that extend engagement. Firm closure denies these openings.

The method works through operant conditioning. High-conflict individuals send hostile messages seeking emotional reactions—your distress, your defensiveness, your counter-attack. Each reaction rewards the behaviour. BIFF responses offer no reward: no emotional content, no extended engagement, no satisfaction of seeing you suffer. Over time, unrewarded behaviour extinguishes. The high-conflict person may initially escalate (an "extinction burst") but eventually redirects energy toward more rewarding targets.

How This Research Is Used in the Book

Eddy's work appears in Chapter 19: Protection and Escape as essential guidance for survivors who cannot implement full no-contact due to shared children, workplace obligations, or ongoing legal proceedings.

The chapter draws on Eddy's expertise regarding legal professionals who understand high-conflict dynamics:

"Legal professionals experienced with high-conflict personalities protect survivors during divorces or custody battles. Narcissists weaponise legal systems, filing spurious motions, dragging out proceedings, and making false accusations. Lawyers who know these tactics protect you while avoiding escalation—they recognise manipulation and strategise around narcissistic behaviour."

This guidance reflects Eddy's core insight: high-conflict individuals require fundamentally different approaches than standard difficult people. An attorney trained in traditional negotiation may inadvertently escalate conflict by treating the narcissist as a reasonable person with different interests; an attorney trained in high-conflict dynamics recognises the pattern and adjusts strategy accordingly.

Eddy's documentation framework informs the chapter's guidance on building court-ready evidence:

"Creating legally useful documentation requires understanding what courts value. Date and time stamp everything. Use objective language: 'He arrived 45 minutes late for pickup' rather than 'He was late as usual.' Include direct quotes when possible: 'He said, "I'll destroy you in court."' Avoid emotional language or interpretations that could be seen as biased. The goal is creating records that would convince a sceptical stranger, not expressing your feelings."

This approach to documentation extends BIFF principles: brief, factual, emotionally neutral. Documentation that reads as emotional or biased undermines credibility; documentation that reads as objective and specific builds it.

The chapter also applies Eddy's insight on pattern documentation:

"Pattern documentation proves most powerful in court. Single incidents might be explained away, but patterns reveal pathology. Document cycles of idealisation and devaluation, patterns of control, escalation around loss of control. Create timelines showing how behaviour evolved. Charts and graphs visualising patterns impact judges more than narrative descriptions."

High-conflict individuals often present well in the limited context of courtroom appearances. Pattern documentation pierces this presentation by revealing behaviour over time that a single hearing cannot capture.

Finally, Eddy's courtroom strategies inform guidance on maintaining composure:

"Remain calm despite provocation—essential but challenging. Narcissists will trigger you in court, knowing emotional reactions make you appear unstable. They might smirk while testifying about abuse, lie blatantly, or make subtle threatening gestures only you recognise. Your emotional response becomes the instability they claimed. Practice emotional regulation techniques and bring support people who can signal when you need to calm down."

This guidance reflects Eddy's understanding that high-conflict individuals are strategic performers. They understand that courtrooms are stages where composure signals credibility. Your calm response to their provocation demonstrates clearly who is reasonable; your emotional reaction confirms their narrative.

Why This Matters for Survivors

If you cannot go no-contact—if you share children, work together, or are navigating a legal proceeding—Eddy's work offers more than communication tips. It offers a fundamental reframe of what communication can and cannot accomplish with a high-conflict personality.

You can stop trying to be understood. This is perhaps the most liberating insight. Every survivor has spent hours—years—crafting the perfect explanation, the undeniable argument, the presentation of evidence that would finally make the narcissist see. It never works. Eddy explains why: they are not interested in understanding you. They cannot hold a balanced view that incorporates your perspective alongside their own. Their all-or-nothing thinking, their preoccupation with blame-shifting, their unmanaged emotions—these are not obstacles to overcome with better communication; they are the fundamental reality you are dealing with. Accepting this is grief work: you are mourning the reasonable exchange you will never have. But it is also liberation: you can stop the exhausting, futile effort to explain yourself.

Your responses are choices, not obligations. When a hostile message arrives, the narcissist has set a frame: this requires response, and the response must address their accusations. BIFF teaches that you set the frame. You decide what requires response (often less than they claim), what the response addresses (necessary logistics only), and when the exchange ends (when you end it). The narcissist presents their messages as demands you must meet. BIFF reveals them as provocations you can decline.

Brief responses are not passive or weak. Survivors often fear that brief responses signal defeat—that failing to defend yourself means accepting their characterisation. The opposite is true. Brief responses demonstrate that you do not need their approval, do not fear their attacks, and will not be drawn into their games. They signal a strength the narcissist does not expect and cannot leverage. Your lengthy defensive explanations, however well-crafted, signal that their opinion of you matters enough to fight for. Your BIFF response signals it does not.

Documentation becomes protection. Every BIFF response creates a record of your reasonableness. Every hostile message they send creates a record of their aggression. Over time, this record tells a story courts, mediators, and professionals can see clearly: one party is reasonable; one is not. This protection matters whether or not you ever use the documentation formally. Knowing you have it changes how you navigate the relationship. Knowing they are creating records of their own behaviour may, in some cases, moderate it. When flying monkeys or institutions question your account, documentation provides evidence that counters their gaslighting.

The children benefit from reduced conflict. For co-parents, BIFF is not just self-protection but child protection. Research consistently shows that parental conflict—not divorce itself—damages children. Every extended hostile exchange exposes children to conflict energy, models dysfunctional communication, and potentially triangulates them into adult disputes. BIFF exchanges are boring. They contain no drama. They model that conflict does not require engagement. Children in high-conflict custody situations whose healthy parent implements BIFF consistently show reduced anxiety and improved adjustment. Your brevity protects them.

Clinical Implications

For psychiatrists, psychologists, and trauma-informed healthcare providers, Eddy's framework offers practical tools for managing unavoidable high-conflict interactions and guidance for clients navigating them.

BIFF complements therapeutic work. Many survivors spend significant session time processing exchanges with their high-conflict co-parent, family member, or colleague. These exchanges often follow predictable patterns: provocation, elaborate response, escalation, exhaustion. Teaching BIFF interrupts this cycle by giving clients a structured alternative to their instinctive defensive responses. Sessions previously spent processing conflict can shift toward deeper therapeutic work once the conflict volume decreases.

Clients can practice BIFF between sessions. Unlike insight-oriented work that requires the therapeutic relationship, BIFF is a skill that improves with practice. Clinicians can work with clients to draft BIFF responses to actual messages, creating templates they can adapt. Clients can share responses before sending them, building confidence and catching slips into emotional engagement. Over time, BIFF becomes automatic, reducing the cognitive and emotional load of each exchange.

BIFF reduces reactive abuse risk. High-conflict individuals often deliberately provoke reactions that they then characterise as evidence of the victim's instability—a form of DARVO. Survivors who respond emotionally provide ammunition; survivors who respond with BIFF deny it. Clinicians working with clients in custody disputes or legal proceedings should emphasise that every communication is potential evidence. BIFF responses cannot be used against the client; provoked emotional responses can and will be.

Parallel parenting requires BIFF. For clients co-parenting with high-conflict personalities, parallel parenting—each parent managing their own parenting time independently with minimal interaction—is often the only viable approach. Parallel parenting relies on BIFF communication through structured channels like parenting apps. Clinicians should assess whether clients are attempting cooperative co-parenting with someone incapable of cooperation, and recommend the shift to parallel parenting with BIFF as appropriate.

The high-conflict framework aids assessment. Eddy's four characteristics of high-conflict personalities—all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, extreme behaviours, and preoccupation with blaming—provide a useful clinical lens. When clients describe the difficult person in their life, assessing for these patterns helps determine whether BIFF and parallel strategies are appropriate (the person is high-conflict) or whether standard conflict resolution might work (the person is merely difficult). The distinction matters for treatment planning.

Bibliotherapy with BIFF accelerates progress. The book is accessible and practical, making it suitable for direct client recommendation. Clients who read BIFF between sessions arrive with shared vocabulary, practice attempts to discuss, and often reduced despair as they recognise that their struggles have solutions. The validation of seeing their experience described in clinical terms—"high-conflict personality"—helps counter gaslighting that may have convinced them they were the problem.

Broader Implications

Eddy's work on high-conflict communication extends beyond individual relationships to illuminate patterns across institutions, professions, and society.

Family Court Reform

Eddy's research has been instrumental in shifting how family courts understand and manage high-conflict cases. Traditional family court approaches assumed that both parties in custody disputes were essentially reasonable people with different interests, and that mediation, communication, and judicial exhortation to "cooperate" would resolve disputes. This assumption fails catastrophically when one party has a high-conflict personality.

Courts trained in Eddy's framework recognise that high-conflict individuals require structural management, not therapeutic intervention. This means parallel parenting orders rather than cooperative co-parenting expectations, communication through monitored apps rather than direct contact, specific detailed parenting plans that reduce opportunities for conflict, and recognition that one party's "refusal to cooperate" may actually be appropriate protection from a high-conflict ex-partner. Family courts in multiple jurisdictions have adopted Eddy's training, and his work is regularly cited in custody decisions.

Workplace High-Conflict Management

The BIFF framework has been widely adopted in human resources and workplace conflict resolution. Traditional workplace mediation assumes both parties can engage in good-faith problem-solving—an assumption that fails when one party is high-conflict. HR professionals trained in Eddy's approach recognise when standard intervention will fail and shift to structural solutions: documented communication, clear boundaries, reduced direct interaction, and protection for targets of high-conflict employees.

The implications extend to organisational culture. High-conflict individuals can dominate and damage teams, driving out capable employees who refuse to tolerate the chaos. Understanding high-conflict patterns helps organisations identify problematic personalities earlier and implement appropriate management before extensive damage occurs. Some organisations now screen for high-conflict traits in hiring processes, recognising that a single high-conflict employee can cost more in turnover, productivity loss, and legal exposure than their contribution could ever justify.

Healthcare Administration

Healthcare settings face particular challenges with high-conflict patients and family members. Eddy's framework has been adopted in patient relations, helping staff respond to hostile communications in ways that reduce escalation while maintaining appropriate care. The BIFF approach is particularly valuable in healthcare because emotional responses to hostile patients can create liability, documentation matters intensely, and the power differential between providers and patients requires careful management.

Online Community Management

Eddy's work anticipated the explosion of high-conflict behaviour on social media. The book's guidance on "social media meltdowns" has become standard reading for community managers, content moderators, and anyone managing public-facing accounts. The principles translate directly: do not engage emotionally with hostile comments, do not provide elaborate explanations that become new attack surfaces, maintain professional tone, and close interactions clearly. Many organisations now train social media staff in BIFF-adjacent approaches to manage the inevitable high-conflict individuals their public presence attracts.

Political and Institutional Discourse

While Eddy's work focuses on individual high-conflict personalities, the patterns he describes manifest at institutional and political scales. All-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, extreme behaviours, and preoccupation with blaming others characterise certain political movements and institutional cultures. Recognising these patterns at collective scale helps individuals and organisations maintain appropriate boundaries without being drawn into escalating conflict cycles. The BIFF principle—do not provide emotional fuel—applies whether the high-conflict entity is an ex-spouse or a political movement.

Limitations and Considerations

Eddy's influential framework has important limitations that inform how we apply it.

BIFF is a management tool, not a solution. BIFF helps you survive unavoidable contact with high-conflict individuals; it does not transform them into reasonable people or heal the relationship. Survivors should not expect that perfect BIFF implementation will eventually break through to the narcissist. BIFF manages the problem; it does not solve it. Where no-contact is possible, it remains the optimal approach for healing.

Implementation requires emotional regulation capacity. BIFF is harder than it sounds because it requires not acting on instinctive defensive responses. The impulse to explain, defend, and correct is powerful, especially when you are being lied about. Clients with significant trauma responses may struggle to implement BIFF in the moment, even when they understand it intellectually. The reactive abuse dynamic—where the narcissist deliberately provokes you until you snap, then uses your reaction as evidence of your instability—makes emotional regulation even more critical. Therapeutic work on emotional regulation may need to precede or accompany BIFF training.

High-conflict individuals may escalate initially. When narcissistic supply is denied, many high-conflict individuals intensify their provocations before giving up—the "extinction burst" phenomenon. Survivors implementing BIFF should be prepared for things to get worse before they get better, and should have safety plans if escalation could become dangerous. BIFF is not appropriate as a first response when physical safety is at immediate risk; safety planning and professional intervention take priority.

Cultural context affects implementation. BIFF emerged from North American professional and legal contexts. How appropriate "friendliness" appears, what counts as "firm" without being rude, and what communication patterns are expected vary across cultures. Clinicians working cross-culturally should adapt BIFF guidance to local norms while preserving core principles: brevity, factual focus, neutral tone, clear closure.

Not all difficult people are high-conflict. Eddy distinguishes high-conflict personalities (stable patterns) from ordinary people having difficult moments (situational conflict). BIFF is designed for the former. With people capable of good-faith engagement, BIFF may come across as cold or avoidant. Assessment of whether someone is truly high-conflict or merely in temporary conflict matters for choosing appropriate strategies. The four characteristics—all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, extreme behaviours, preoccupation with blame—help distinguish patterns from episodes.

Children may not understand the shift. When one parent switches to BIFF communication, children may notice the change in tone and dynamics. They may be confused by the contrast between the high-conflict parent's emotional communications and the BIFF parent's neutrality, or may be manipulated by the high-conflict parent into perceiving BIFF as coldness. Age-appropriate explanation—"Daddy and I communicate differently now to keep things calmer"—and therapeutic support for children help manage this transition.

Historical Context

BIFF was published in 2012, building on Eddy's earlier work developing the high-conflict personality concept. The book arrived at a crucial moment in family law's evolution. Courts had long recognised that some cases consumed disproportionate resources—the same parents appearing repeatedly, filing motion after motion, unable to resolve basic issues despite years of litigation. What courts lacked was a framework for understanding why some cases were different and what to do about it.

Eddy's dual training as therapist and attorney positioned him uniquely to bridge clinical understanding of personality disorders and practical legal intervention. He could explain to judges why certain litigants behaved as they did (clinical insight) while providing structured interventions that worked within legal frameworks (practical solutions). His testimony as an expert witness and his training of family court professionals helped shift judicial understanding from "both parties need to cooperate more" toward "one party has a high-conflict personality that requires structural management."

The book's publication preceded the explosion of high-conflict behaviour on social media that characterised the mid-2010s and accelerated during the pandemic. What Eddy observed in family courts—hostile escalation enabled by distance and written communication—became ubiquitous online. His guidance on managing "hostile email" translated directly to managing hostile social media interactions. The BIFF framework became standard reading for online community managers and social media professionals who had independently discovered that engagement with hostile users escalated rather than resolved conflict.

The book has been followed by numerous companion works—BIFF for CoParent Communication, BIFF at Work, It's All Your Fault!, and others—extending the framework to specific contexts. The High Conflict Institute Eddy co-founded now trains thousands of professionals annually, and his work has influenced family court reform, workplace policies, and online community standards globally.

Perhaps most importantly, BIFF gave survivors a tool. Before Eddy's framework, survivors knew instinctively that explaining themselves to narcissists failed, but they blamed themselves for failing to explain well enough. Eddy validated that the failure was structural—you cannot reason with someone fundamentally uninterested in reason—while providing an alternative that actually works. This combination of validation and practical skill has made the book a word-of-mouth phenomenon in survivor communities, regularly recommended alongside works like Bancroft's Why Does He Do That? and Walker's Complex PTSD.

BIFF: Quick Responses to High-Conflict People, Their Personal Attacks, Hostile Email and Social Media Meltdowns

APA Citation