Be very careful with this around folks with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Anything you say can and will be used against you to maximum destructive effect. It can and will eventually save you eventually, but not until you’ve been fed through the meat grinder a few times.

Sounds like you've been through the ringer yourself. I learned very early not to trust or be honest with authority figures.

Linking the people-pleasing to RSD and thus ADHD recently was a massive eye-opener. And the connection between people-pleasing and cutting people off as two sides of the same emotional spectrum.

Yes. I've personally learned it's not just authority figures though. I've had friends and lovers do it too. Trauma bonding is for all kinds of relationships [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding], and folks with traumatic pasts do it pretty naturally sometimes.

Being overly honest to someone who is actually a problem is one of the common behaviors, as is forgetting some/all of their actual problematic behavior when they 'get better' so as to preserve the important seeming relationship.

"However, later on, repeated instances of abuse and maltreatment generate a cognitive shift in the victim's mind: that preventing the abuse is in their power. By the time the inescapability of the abuse becomes apparent, the emotional trauma bond is already strong.[12]"

Specifically, I'm wondering if this particular trait is actually a conditioned response (look up trauma bonding) to narcissistic abuse.

Being fully authentic and honest (regardless of the circumstances) is essentially narcissist bait. And it works.

And at the beginning, narcissists WILL make things better when they have someone like that around. They got their supply, and the love bombing, extreme gratitude, etc. will all help make EVERYTHING feel amazing.

However, at some point dysregulation of one or both parties starts to happen (or one or both parties starts getting bored), and then that gets turned around and the shit starts, and then any authenticity or honesty gets used against the target while the NPD person denies all responsibility.

I'd highly recommend The Evolution of Trust, by Nicky Case. It puts some of these ideas into an interactive framework in the context of game theory.

It shows how interactions between these different kinds of people play out given different population distributions.

https://ncase.me/trust/