Narcissistic Parents: Golden Child and Scapegoat

Projective identification in the narcissistic family

In narcissistic families, there is often a golden child and scapegoat dynamic. This is the result of the splitting defence mechanism, which is common in personality disorders. Splitting is when contradictory views arise due to intolerable emotions that are conflicting. It is when someone can only see people, themselves and events/situations as either good or bad with nothing in between. It is a very primitive way of looking at the world as it leaves no room for grey areas.

People with personality disorders induce behaviour in their children by acting in ways that reflect their expectations of them. If this projection is a delusion of superiority, then we have a golden child. If it involves devaluation, we are dealing with a scapegoat. At times, these children can switch roles depending on which role is being projected onto them.

When these parts have been projected excessively into another person, they can only be controlled by controlling the other person. — Melanie Klein

Golden Child:

This child as the name suggests, is the favourite child of the narcissistic parent. These parents pick one of their children to project all of their best qualities. As a result, the child receives special treatment and often has fewer rules and expectations compared to their siblings. They may be given the best of everything. Regardless, due to the controlling and authoritarian nature of narcissistic parents, the golden child is coerced into being perfect, which creates a toxic environment.

Such parents often have unreasonably high expectations of their children and as a result the golden child does not feel safe voicing their own opinions. They are also engulfed by their parents. The enmeshment trauma resulting from this creates a lack of boundaries and identity. Such parents often put a lot of pressure on this child to succeed, feeling that it is because they want the best for them. In reality, the golden child is merely an extension of the narcissistic parent’s grandiosity — the parent wants to use their achievements to gain attention and admiration from others.

The narcissistic parent splits her personality into good and bad traits, qualities, and dimensions. She projects his or her good aspects, the ones she finds to be acceptable (ego-syntonic) or even desirable onto the golden child who then embodies and reifies everything that’s right and proper in the parent’s personality, an extension of the parent’s grandiosity. — Sam Vaknin

Scapegoat:

The scapegoat is the person on whom all the bad qualities of the family are projected. They are often unfairly blamed and shamed for the mistakes, shortcomings and problems of the narcissistic parent. As a result, they feel that they can do no right. Even when they accomplish something, it is often dismissed and not paid attention to. The reason behind this is that the qualities and traits the narcissistic parent cannot stand in themselves are projected onto the scapegoat. This allows the parent to feel free of these intolerable emotions.

The devaluation of the parent causes the child to either internalise the parent’s hostility by growing up to believe that the parent’s opinion of them is the truth or to externalise and rebel against the parent and attempt to break free from their influence. Scapegoats often struggle with low self-esteem, anxiety and depression. Growing up they can feel jealous of the golden child, which leads to friction within the family, giving plenty of opportunities for triangulation. Other family members can be encouraged by the narcissistic parent, either overtly or tacitly, to bully the scapegoat.

In contradistinction, the traits and qualities of himself or herself that the narcissistic parent finds bad, unacceptable, rejected, or shame-inducing are projected onto and attributed to the scapegoat child, the black sheep of the family, the reject and the outcast who is then rendered a constant reminder of the parent’s shortcomings, a challenge to her fantastic self-perception and, therefore, a permanent narcissistic injury. — Sam Vaknin

If you enjoyed this post and would like to read more, you can subscribe here — https://medium.com/subscribe/@ella_harris to get an email whenever I publish a story. You can also buy me ☕ via — https://ko-fi.com/ella_harris