When the Scapegoat Leaves the Toxic Family Cult
Proceed with caution...
Do the narcissists in the family regret it? Yes and no — it’s complicated.
Do they miss or love the scapegoat? Do they turn on each other instead? No, because they were always turning on each other anyways.
The family dynamics of a narcissistic family cult are complicated and emotionally charged with GRIEF, TRAUMA, and DESPAIR.
If you have two narcissist parents (many of us do), you’ll likely be assigned different roles with each parent at birth. I’m scapegoat to my mother but invisible child to my father.
My father’s scapegoats were my mother and sister. My mother’s golden was my sister. Her scapegoat was also my father.
People get treated differently by narcissists based on the roles assigned to them through their split thinking: all good, all bad, or invisible/irrelevant.
Narcissists marry for live-in scapegoat supply. They tend to regularly be unmasked behind closed doors, so for grandiosity they need to go to the outside world or have a golden child.
The golden child is only golden for the first few years of childhood. EVERYONE in a narcissist’s life will be split to all bad eventually. At a narcissist split, you enter the alternation between devaluation and breadcrumbing before the emotional and/or physical discard.
The same behavior that applies to narcissist’s partners and friends applies to their children. They use the same methods of abuse — from physical, to verbal, to gaslighting, to triangulating, to brainwashing, to pathological lying.
The golden child also gets LOVEBOMBING and short term IDEALIZATION PHASE.
The golden is always favored and always abused less, but they’re stunted to the age they were split, because that’s when their parents introduced them to the same shames they’re haunted by.
Every terrible thing that happened to the narcissist parent will be sparingly used on the golden child to terrorize and keep them in line. These could be as dark as sexual abuse.
While the golden will have LESS abuse and less violence, they’re fragile and emotionally immature, so a little goes a LONG way.