It’s common for narcissistic parents to treat their children differently. Unbeknownst to my mother, Suzan Lee, my brother Colby and I were cast into the classic narcissistic scapegoat / golden child dynamic by my father, Thom.

To a narcissistic parent, the scapegoat / golden child dynamic is like a car battery. If you hook the red cable up as the positive side, and the black cable up as the negative side, the narcissist has a lifetime supply of narcissistic juice (validation, admiration, control and selfobject functioning). My father could point to my brother, his golden child, as evidence of his good parenting, while using me, his scapegoat, as a downward comparison target, portraying me as selfish, unstable, or cruel. And when you factor in how narcissists shame and emotionally dysregulate their children, it’s not hard for them to portray the scapegoat as selfish, unstable or cruel, particularly when the abuse starts early like mine did.

“Over the scapegoat the vulnerable narcissistic parent positions themselves as the reasonable, moral, long-suffering, ‘good person.’ When others accept and reinforce that contrast, their sympathy and agreement provides the vulnerable narcissist supply that stabilizes their fragile self image.”

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Evidence shows the narcissistic parent selects the golden child based on temperament, being emotionally attuned to the parent’s expectations, and being less likely to openly challenge authority. The scapegoated child is the one more likely to challenge the narcissist: is more emotionally expressive, strong-willed, sensitive to unfairness, or more likely to expose dysfunction. (Hi Eliza).

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Someone reading this may think if given a choice they’d pick the role of the golden child. A golden child, however, is far more likely to become a narcissists themselves than a scapegoated child. It’s believed that some children of narcissistic parents recognize the advantages their parent(s) gain through narcissistic behavior. For some golden children, these early observations can make the narcissistic model inevitable, even desirable. A devalued scapegoat, by contrast, is more likely to recognize the harm caused by the same behaviors and reject the narcissistic model altogether.

In this video below, skip to 1:30.

Narcissists love triangulation. If they can be in the middle of two other people, passing disinformation back and forth, that’s a narcissist’s dream. If the narcissist is in the middle, the information passed between parties is rarely true, and most of the time it’s abusive. Toxic and abusive triangulation can create resentment, anger, or animosity between the two other (non narcissist) members in the triangle. This is how narcissists drive wedges between people, and how they alienate family members from one another. Why do they do this? It’s because alienation is a form of coercive control, and narcissists need to control their targets to maintain selfobject functioning.

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Because of this need to control, narcissists attack what their targets cherish most. They look for high leverage situations where they can have the greatest impact with the least effort. They use these leverage points to abuse and to influence behavior.

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For me, my relationships have always been the most important thing in my life. Knowing this early on, my father started attacking my relationships as a young child. He’d used triangulation, smear campaigns, isolation, embarrassment, undermining of trust, played the victim, gaslit me, used DARVO, and sabotaged milestones – all to attack my relationships so he could maintain coercive control over me. My mother blocked this, and stopped this as best she could, but after she died I was thrown to the narcissistic vampires. Even today, at 82 years old, my father continues his attacks on my relationships in weird ways through triangulation, and on social media.

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An Example of his Sabotaging of Milestones and its Effect: Just before I was to graduate from Chico State, my family had an email chain going that was discussing everyone driving to Chico State to watch my graduation. My grandmother, Aunt Paulette, and father were emailing back and forth, discussing the family all driving to Chico to watch me walk and support me during this milestone. For me, graduating from college was one of my mother’s dying wishes, and she had only passed five years before.

But instead of organizing a group effort to celebrate this milestone, my father stopped this idea in a final email that was forwarded to me by my Aunt that read something like, “Tyler did this on his own. Let him celebrate it on his own.” I never understood that until now. I now see this as the resentment of a vulnerable narcissist who didn’t feel like he was getting enough phrase from his son.

I had graduated from college. It was one of my mother’s dying wishes, and yet nobody showed up to celebrate my graduation. What do you think the end result was? My father’s act of sabotaging this important milestone created a resentment in me towards my own family. This is how narcissists drive wedges between people – in this case, family members.

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The corners of the “vulnerable” narcissistic triangle are offender, victim and rescuer. My father was always the victim. 99% of the time I was the offender, and family and friends were my father’s rescuers.

Once, however, when my father was working on the Weber’s remodel in Sonoma years ago, my father targeted a Sonoma contractor, Mike Beale, in his triangulation. Mike was the offender, or target, my father was again the victim (always), and I was in the unfamiliar role of being my father’s rescuer. (It’s ironic that the lifelong scapegoat here was now his rescuer).

As my father told me about his interactions with Mike Beale, my dad played the victim so well, and made me feel so sorry for him, that I wanted to kick Mike Beale’s ass. I look back on it now and it’s so ironic. I was now my father’s rescuer, the same role I had bitterly detested all my life. I was so convinced by my father’s victim mentality and self-pity that I didn’t even consider going to Mike (someone I knew from high school) and asking his side of things. I didn’t consider that my father should learn to stand up for himself, keep his concerns about others private, or fight his own battles. I didn’t consider asking the Webers if what Mike was doing was wrong. My father, as the victim, had me completely fooled. The cartoon below explains this dynamic perfectly.

Experts believe my emotions in this scenario gave my father narcissistic supply or what some refer to as “juice.” This part is important. Narcissistic juice for my father here wasn’t to come in the form of a confrontation between me and Mike Beale. My father’s narcissistic supply or “juice” came only when my father saw I was emotionally charged and wanted to rescue him from his offender, Mike. I was enraged, my father saw this, and he was resupplied. That’s all he needed.

The other 99.9% of the time, as my father’s scapegoat, I was the offender or target in my father’s triangulations.

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“The vulnerable narcissistic father often attacks the scapegoat’s reputation by triangulating friends and family — distorting facts, exaggerating flaws, or spreading false narratives to alienate the child from loved ones.”

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In doing so, my father positioned himself as the victim, recruited sympathy and validation from others, and gained narcissistic supply by attacking me.

“When this pattern begins early in childhood, the vulnerable narcissistic father can gradually isolate the scapegoated child from the very people who should provide the child love, protection, and support. Through years of provocation, triangulation, false narratives, exaggerations, characters attacks, and embarrassing the scapegoated son, he alienates the child from the family and turns those same people into his own protectors, rescuers, and ongoing sources of narcissistic supply. Once the target is isolated, the narcissist faces little accountability. The people hearing his version of events no longer have a meaningful relationship with the target, allowing the narcissist to distort the truth or invent new accusations with little risk of being challenged.”

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This is a form of gaslighting.

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In studying this, it took me a while to realize all the dynamics of a narcissistic triangle. First, the misinformation in a triangle goes both ways. Not only were my father and brother misrepresenting my words, actions and reactions, but they were also giving me misinformation about what other family members were saying about me. When my brother was included in this dynamic, the triangle became more amplified and powerful.

During my father’s intervention, my brother, as my father’s flying monkey, had fed me carefully placed misinformation from different members of my family. Because I had been isolated from them and still trusted my brother, I had no reliable way – or, at the time, perhaps no desire – to verify what my father and brother were presenting to me as truth. Like the Mike Beale story above, I couldn’t simply talk to the Kaestner family directly, compare stories, or verify information going either way in the triangle. This is what makes narcissistic triangulation so effective: Isolation removes the opportunity to hear the other side.

But there’s another part of this dynamic that may be difficult to understand without thoroughly understanding narcissism: emotional dysregulation. My father and brother obviously knew me well. They knew which emotional buttons to push. My father started pushing those buttons when I was kid. It didn’t take much – a comment, an accusation, or a carefully planted piece of information – to make me feel betrayed and provoke an intense emotional response. This is emotional dysregulation. Narcissists use emotional dysregulation to control their targets.

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“When someone is already hurt, isolated, and emotionally overwhelmed, a relatively small piece of information can trigger a reaction that appears irrational, disproportionate, or even petty to someone looking at it from the outside.“

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What others don’t see is everything that preceded the reaction: the abuse, the isolation, the accumulated hurt, and the belief that yet another important relationship had been turned. This is emotional dysregulation that intensifies alienation because those on the outside looking in see the target as irrational – and really, they “are” now irrational because of the ongoing narcissistic abuse and triggering.

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Cognitive Dissonance: The mental discomfort or tension a person feels when they hold two or more contradictory beliefs, values, or ideas at the same time, or when their behavior directly contradicts their personal beliefs.