Also, what makes you think people do not trigger emotions in other people? You seem to think it is inappropriate for her to put responsibility on you for eliciting emotional reactions from her.

You seem to be confusing emotions with behavior here, or at least your wording seems like that to me.

=There is emotion. That's one thing.

=There is reaction out of that emotion. That's another thing.

I don't know how I feel about whether people can trigger emotions in others. But as far as what I'm looking for in personal connections: I want people who are able to be accountable for their behavior choices.

In that vein, your phrase "eliciting emotional reaction" is an interesting phrase to me, as it seems to make a slide from emotion into behavior in a kind of slippery way. Though I may be misunderstanding what you mean.

If that were true, then I suppose our parents are not responsible for upsetting us with their abuse? I can tell you that my parents always put the blame for my emotional reactions to their abuse squarely onto me. When they called me names, or said something rude, and I got upset, they told me to "stop being so sensitive" and "stop reacting so emotionally." They expected me to control my emotional reactions to them, rather than them to change their behavior towards me at all. Are you expecting the same thing from this friend? That she should stop holding you accountable for how your actions and words make her feel? That she should simply be the one to change her emotional reactions to you?

Okay, this just got really slippery.

Context: I'm no-contact with my narcissist parent and have been for many years. I was no contact before I even knew NPD was a thing, it was that instinctive for me.

So my own personal response to NPD abuse of the type you're describing here is to cut it the hell out of my life. I don't play around with stuff like that. So from my perspective, if you can't engage with what I'm saying outside of a framework of me being akin to someone with NPD, that's going to create lack of clarity. Because as far as I'm concerned, it is extremely unwise to engage with narcissists as if the usual dynamics and rules of human interaction apply, or to apply the dynamics of dealing with a NPD abuser to regular (if painful, difficult or even dysfunction in a more normal way) human relationships.

Put another way: what you are describing about abusive parents is, for me, first and foremost about manipulation in the context of abuse - and since this is LAN, I assume you mean abuse by parents specifically with NPD. If my friend had reason to feel I had NPD, I think she would need to run for the hills, cut off contact with me, get the fuck away. That would be my focus, not some philosophical hypothetical argument about whether as a whole, people can trigger emotional responses in others.

Sorry for the strong language, but really, I don't play when it comes to interacting with actual narcissists and related kinds of abuse. The rest of this stuff doesn't matter at all if you're dealing with a narcissist. As I wrote above None of the usual rules of human interaction apply. I don't see it as some spectrum where normal human interaction can reasonably be compared to the toxicity and manipulation and flat-out lack of human regard and respect that we get from narcissists' abusive practices.