The Narcissistic Family Dynamic

For our next scenario, let's take a look at the Narcissist Family Tree. You can probably place characters from former scenarios into these family roles.

The Narcissist, The Enabler, The Golden Child, and The Family Scapegoat.

We're going to be discussing one example of a Narcissistic Family Dynamic.

In this scenario you, the reader and/or listener, will be assuming the role of Family Scapegoat. You will carry the compounding weight of what your parents and sibling are not able to recognize in themselves without shattering their created identities. You’re the only one who allowed yourself the freedom to live from your heart, and so you’re the fire keeper of the entire family. Your job is to shovel coal, keep the engines going, and stay below deck. Because of this, you’re not afraid of hard work and even learn how to enjoy and find fulfillment in it. But left imbalanced and unhealed, this will turn up later in life as codependency. Interpreting many if not most relationships as backbreaking and thankless, but at least it’s honest work.

Your mother, Tammy, will be playing the role of Enabler. She is the school PTA president and quite active in many areas of your community but surprisingly doesn’t have a very strong voice at home.

Your father, David, will be playing the role of the Narcissist. He's well liked throughout the community, but also doesn’t count anyone as a true friend. He’s charismatic and quick to volunteer his assistance to anyone and everyone outside the family, but inside the home, he can be cold, vindictive, and pout like a scolded child.

Your sibling Beth, will be playing the Golden Child. She carries the compounding weight of everything your parents want your family and themselves to be. The star, the success, the one everybody loves who can do no wrong! They don’t see her as a person, but an extension of themselves, the proof of a job well done as parents. They live vicariously through her and project onto her their own internal split and polarized identity. She is put on a pedestal to be seen by all as the face of the family before she has ever gottan a chance to find out who she really is.

Although your mother is a strong willed and intelligent woman, she’s very good at playing a helpless victim. When it comes to your father, she falls into insecurities and submission. She complains and acknowledges the constant disrespect. The way he looks at other women. The affection he doesn’t give. The time he never seems to have for her or the family but hands out in loads to everyone else. But as soon as she's done complaining, she goes right back to life as usual.

David doesn’t seem to be vulnerable with anyone but his own mother. He’s good at faking humility, but in fact needs constant praise to balance his deep insecurity and he’s never been open to any kind of accountability or honest feedback seeing that kind of self-reflection as a malicious attack.

Tammy's always known that about him, being the one to initiate the relationship and even talk him into the marriage proposal, but it's also given her her own sense of superiority, of control, of being the mature and stable one in their relationship. This is how their marriage has worked for so long. She often feels more like his mother than his wife, which she equally complains and gloats about to no end.

Your mother also knows that giving up the emotional abuse and neglect would mean giving up financial status, because as much as David may complain about money, he makes it quite obvious he's got plenty of it. Sometimes carrying around thousands in cash in his wallet at times quickly flashing it around town, buying the biggest and best while setting a tone of debt and extreme frugality inside your home.

Over and over, you watch your mother get new haircuts or dress up to receive attention from your father but it’s always painful to watch. Even as a child, you picked up on the tension and her heart breaking.

Doesn’t she know by now this is not gonna end well?

You cringe, bracing for the response he’s given a thousand times before.

“What do you think of my dress?” she says, “You think I look pretty?”

This kind of question never ends well.

“Sure. You look just fine” he sighs, exhausted from her constant need for attention, “but I mean what do you want me to say? You’re no Cindy Crawford.”

Your mother has always acknowledged his constant emotional abuse but at the end of the day, she just wants to be loved by him (and have something to complain about.)So even when your own pain is acknowledged you're often told to stop whining about it or bringing it up because it just makes things worse.

Don’t you know they’ve each got it hard enough and far worse with the love they never received themselves.

As a child this made it very clear that the better you could shut up and put up with your own pain and discomfort, the more likely you were to receive love and make people happy.

As you got older, you realized loyalty is what holds the entire family structure together, and as hard as you tried to speak with a language of love, tried to get members of your family to have honest conversations and speak openly with one another, they just don't function like that at all. They never have.

The problem is, you can't control a situation with love, and that leaves too much room for fear and uncertainty in someone who doesn't trust the world and is always bracing for abandonment.

Control of self-image, information, and money gives them a false sense of security from experiencing that abandonment and that is what a close safe family unit feels like for them- a false sense of safety. Control and loyalty, even if it’s through blackmail.

Even at a young age, your nature wouldn't allow you to function this way without the drive for true connection and love breaking through repeatedly, sometimes making your family members see you as foolish and overly sensitive. So you found different ways to find acceptance and connection with your family.

You became the regular peacekeeper of the house. The joke maker to intercept awkward moments and tension, bringing family members back to life. The one running back and forth putting out fires when there’s a disagreement. It's the one way you’ve finally found strong connection and belonging with your family members, because they each come to you individually with their problems. But it never goes further than that. If you try to bring things up in conversations later so they can be addressed and resolved as a group, they quickly put you in your place and discredit your sanity. “You’re always making things up,” they say, “I never said that.” "You misunderstood me."

As a whole, the other members of the family lack any real or honest intimacy with one another, so they find common ground by bonding over a common enemy. You.

Being your sibling, you've always thought of your sister Beth as a teammate, but it's pretty clear she's always seen you as her competition. Any conversation the two of you have is liable to be used against you. She's good at finding a way to use your vulnerable moments against you to establish her permanent spot in first place.

Your mother, grieving her own loss of independence and powerful feminine nature, lives vicariously through your sister. Praising her constantly and creating a persona of near perfection, which also means, Beth can do no wrong if she is to maintain this image. This is quite a weight for her to carry and so in order to not let your parents down, she needs to make sure the cards are stacked in her favor at all times. In order to keep things running smoothly she must remain the star of the family which also means that when her flaws and mistakes do become visible, they're often quickly hidden or not acknowledged by your parents whatsoever.

For the unhealed child that felt abandoned or without sense of security in their own family, as an adult they may try to create control by creating clear procedures and lines of command in the home. This kind of black and white thinking in parents can translate to seeing one child as good and the other as bad. One sets the bar for the family image, the other hides the shame. It's a translation of the separation and distortion present within themselves.

Many compliments you receive may be paired with a reminder that you're being measured against your sibling. Your talent, your personality, and even your physical appearance is comparatively paralleled with Beth's and she's also well aware of this. Your parents have made a point to pin you two against one another since you can remember and unfortunately, it's formed a very toxic bond between the two of you.

You can't trust someone who's constantly strategizing how to win against you.

Even as the two of you get older, Beth becomes enraged when it appears that you're doing well or receiving any kind of praise. This threatens her entire identity and role as the star of the family, and she will find any way she can to tarnish your achievements to get herself back in the spotlight. This is the only way she knows how to feel safe and loved. She must remain the responsible good one, and you must remain the mess-up, the bad one.

Whenever you were getting in trouble, whenever you were being crowned once again as the family disappointment, Beth shined even brighter. So when there were not faults or mistakes to point out? She began to make them up.

Even as an adult, it’s not unheard of for you to still receive raised eyebrows and heavy sighs for the paint you spilled on the carpet when you were four. This makes it hard for you not to highlight and intensely scrutinize every real or falsely perceived mistake you make throughout life. You learn to confess to your every fault and then some, trying your best to iron out this lifelong streak of being a constant let down.

You only begin to recognize this when later in life people start repeatedly saying things like-“

Why are you apologizing?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

There's still memories you can't quite make sense of. Stories you find out about and think, "When did that happen? How did I not even hear about this?"

It’s disorienting and alienating realizing how many secrets were going on in your own home.

The older you get the more you question if you have any idea who the members of your family truly are. You’ve gotten glimpses of who they are at times and it was actually quite unsettling. But I mean, they’re you’re family.

Aren’t families supposed to drive one another crazy?

Aren’t siblings supposed to bully one another and fight for their parent's attention?

Doesn’t every husband and wife bicker and argue from time to time?

The older you get, the more you wonder how much is too much?

It’s hard to see anything out of place or question your environment when you’ve never experienced anything different.

Every family has their troubles and there’s not a person on earth who makes it through life without some kinda trauma, so it can often take years and distance to sort through things and see them clearly.

As time goes on your family member’s public images begin to crack under the weight of juggling so many lies. The sides of them they only showed in private, the sides of them you always had an excuse for are becoming unavoidably obvious.

How much of you is truly you? How much of it has been your assigned role from the beginning? Can you believe anything they told you about yourself?

If loyalty to your assigned role is the thread that holds your family together, then naming you as the source of all of their problems makes you their own patchwork quilt of blame and shame.

So let's think about it like this-

Ya know how we can roll our trash to the sidewalk once a week and think, "Ah there we go! No longer my problem." Technically yes, it's not in our home anymore, but our trash has only been moved to cause a problem somewhere else. Somewhere out of our line of sight.

It can be a little painful and uncomfortable acknowledging the impact we each have on our planet just from the trash we pass off for someone else to take care of. To be someone else's responsibility. Because it's never truly taken care of, it's just packed away out of sight as best as it can be. It’s messy, but our old ways of creating and ridding ourselves of waste? Aren’t working out.

I imagine drone footage of plastic bottles floating in the ocean and recognizing one of them as mine. Even if no one else on earth recognized it? I did. I know where it came from…

Youch. Right to the gut.

It’s hard, it’s painful, and it has to be addressed one way or another.

With any uncomfortable realization, we can’t let our own guilt paralyze us or polarize us to the point of denial and lashing out at others. We have to learn to feel the discomfort and think, “I can do better. I can learn new ways so I don’t repeat this, and bit by bit, I can help create change.”

This uncomfortable realization of personal impact is exactly what some people feel when they look at us. We are the harsh truth staring them in the face that their secrets and injustices never actually went away. This is why the scapegoat of the family must be ostracized and discredited at all costs. It’s too painful for some people see.

Can you imagine if suddenly your garbage man let you know the landfills are at capacity so, he'd be making rounds starting next week bringing back all of your trash for you to take care of from the last week. The last month. The last ten years…

Right?!

Ho-ly Shit.

And this is exactly the kind of reaction you may receive from family or friends the moment you try to address the truth or express you're at capacity and can no longer carry their shame and abuse.

They may literally throw temper tantrums or try to disappear completely where you'll never find them.

"This is RIDICULOUS!" they'll say!  "How could you attack me like this!? This so unfair! You're awful! Why would you do this to me!? After everything I've done for you!"

They may try a more psychologically manipulative route, trying to push you back into shame and submission saying things along the lines of-

Whatever it was, it wasn’t actually that bad.

Whatever someone confided in you, you have no business bringing up.

Whatever happened? You remembered incorrectly.

You're just looking for attention.

My gosh things would run so much smoother for everyone if you weren’t so insistent on discussing things...

They may go silent for a while and then resurface, trying to pick things up as if nothing happened, hoping you'll take the bait and play along.

It can be incredibly painful at times because as much as individual family members may confide in you privately, you may also find that you are purposefully omitted from numerous events, birthday parties, news pertaining to relatives, you name it. They need it to appear that it's your choice to alienate yourself from the family so when it becomes obvious that you won't be playing their intended role for you any longer, your voice won't be heard or believed. They've already made you out to be unstable, attention seeking, and selfish.

This is how they protect themselves from dealing with their own garbage. They’ve been preparing for this moment the whole time because they never knew how to trust and be present in themselves. They’re always living in fear, strategizing their next line of defense because they assume everyone else is living this way as well.

An unfortunate result of growing up as the scapegoat is that you're most likely accustomed to even desensitized to slander and gossip being spread about you by the people you’re closest to. You might be very used to people having a highly inaccurate idea of who you are, and even how you feel about them.

This can cause feelings of paranoia and defensiveness as you pick up on the confusion and discomfort around people you can't recall ever having a problem with.

It becomes safest to assume you’re not really safe anywhere because you have no idea what’s been said.

Very often family members will use triangulation tactics to make sure others believe you don't like them so they'll keep their distance from you.

This will then illustrate to you exactly what it is you've been told all along- that you exhaust everyone and they all secretly dislike you.

Aside from putting tape over your mouth, this is the best tactic to silence someone, and it's a painful truth to uncover, but it also means that fear driven and inherited beliefs about the world might not be as true as you thought.

When you're in a state of healing, of finding your voice and creating boundaries, your family may avoid and discredit you to protect their own reputations and identity.

To credit your sanity, would mean they have to acknowledge the truth of themselves and fess up to how many lies they’ve told- and that’s not gonna happen.

This scenario, whether in a mild manner or extremes of violence and severe abuse, is often the root for unhealthy relationships we develop throughout life.

Home is where we learn how to love.

How to receive love.

How to see ourselves.

What we deserve and what role we need to play to be accepted and good in the world.

If remaining loyal to someone else’s story is what guarantees love and approval in a household, it’s important to ask ourselves what that story is, who wrote it and who it requires us to be.

Human beings in general are not so simple. Sometimes it's the ones we love the most who hurt us the most and it's usually never all bad memories.

There's wisdom and laughter alongside the exhaustion and confusion. There's bonds of trust alongside horrific betrayal. This is where we can form self-sacrificing beliefs that romanticize the past and put people on pedestals while naming ourselves the problem.

We needed to see our environment and caretakers as safe and good in order to feel loved and safe as children. If the energy we picked up didn't match what we were being told, we had to learn to paint over our intuition. To abandon our on knowing and trust someone else's words to make things feel stable. We were only searching for love the best way we knew how which may have kept us repeating these relationships throughout our lives.

Not seeing people for who they truly are, but who we so badly want them to be. But- we’re getting better.