Author: Tyler Lee

Narcissism is definitely inheritable, but there’s no gene that gets passed down. Narcissism is similar to alcoholism in that way. Scientists can’t pinpoint a gene but both narcissism and alcoholism are a combination of nature and nurture with both afflictions staying within families through multi-generational transmission. As the video below essentially says, the best chance of becoming a narcissist is to have a narcissistic parent.

I’m certain my father is a narcissist. I believe he’s somewhere on the spectrum between subclinical and clinical, with a very good chance of having full-blown NPD (or narcissistic personality disorder). So if my father is a narcissist, and narcissism is inheritable, am I a narcissist? Is my brother, Colby, a narcissist?

I believe my brother is a communal – vulnerable narcissist with the classic golden child, scapegoat setup with his two daughters, Suzan and Eliza. It’s also not uncommon for narcissistic husbands to have codependent / enabling rescuers for wifes, like his wife, Laura.

Thankfully, I’m not a narcissist and I’m happy to have that statement scrutinized.

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In the spring of 2021, I flew to Burbank to work on a property my ex girlfriend owned there. I stayed with Colby in South Pasadena. While watching Colby and Laura’s interaction with Eliza, I said “Eliza and I are a lot alike.” Laura’s immediate response was, “Whatever did Eliza do?” Laura was implying I was a bad person, reinforcing her husband’s golden child status that Laura vehemently protects.

At another point during the visit, Colby said in front of me to Eliza,”I hope you and I are never estranged like Uncle Tyler and Grandpa Thom are.” Why is this relevant? What if I’m right that Colby has his own golden child / scapegoat dynamic in his family with Eliza in the role of scapegoat, and Suzan Lee (think about the name) as the golden child? Was Colby role grooming compliance into Eliza just as she became a teenager? Remember what I wrote earlier about narcissists and their targets. Compliance and loyalty are how narcissists maintain coercive control to insure selfobject functioning. Colby planting that message early in Eliza’s psyche was powerful (and really abusive).

After the visit, I pointed these issues out to my brother, and a few others that I now see as all narcissistic related issues as well. Again, Colby couldn’t or didn’t respond and again that’s telling because narcissists can’t respond to accountability. They can’t apologize.

For normal human interaction, if you were to say, “This is what you’re doing and you need to stop.” A caring individual would say, “You’re right. My bad.” Maybe they’d be inquisitive or offer “Sorry about that. I apologize.” But Colby? My father? They’re incapable.

Weeks after my last visit to South Pasadena, Colby and Laura would send Eliza away to a “special camp” across the country for children struggling within their family structures. This is where I began to draw the line with my brother and ultimately where our friendship ended. I knew all too well that Eliza wasn’t the problem -that she was perfectly fine. I remember when I was the same age as Eliza and my father wanted to put me in Hanna Boys’ Center. The problem wasn’t me. Just like in my brother’s family, the problem wasn’t / isn’t Eliza.

During the last phone conversation I had with my brother in 2021, Colby said to me, “Eliza is starting to take responsibility for her behavior.” All I could think was, “Colby, when are you going to take responsibility for your own actions and protect your children?” I wish I had said something to him then.

The problem wasn’t Eliza five years ago; it was Colby provoking Eliza like our father provoked me.

Colossians 3:21 Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.

That kind of provocation, backed up by narcissistic enablers like my Aunt Shy or Laura, can have devastating effects on family members inside the circle, particularly children. Those effects over time, when left unrecognized, can profoundly shape — and often derail — people’s lives. I know this firsthand.

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To my father and brother,

If either of you would like to challenge my assessments made here, there’s a simple solution: Let’s all submit ourselves to psychiatric evaluation. I’m fine with taking a Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), or a Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) test. Are you?

Here’s an analogy my friend sent me. It’s sad but true….

“A farmer wanting to clear his fields of pest devised a brutal experiment. He threw a dead pig into a deep, dry well and tossed in a dozen rats.

Initially, the rats feasted on the carcass in harmony. But when the meat was stripped to the bone and the days of starvation set in, survival instincts took over.

Trapped in the pit with no way out, they began attacking and devouring one another. Slowly, the numbers dwindled until only one rat remained. It’s eyes were wild, its nature fundamentally altered. It was no longer a scavenger; it was a killer.

The farmer then hoisted this lone survivor out and released it back into his field. The rat ignored the crops entirely – instead, it hunted and killed every other rat it could find.”

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“This is the darkest, most accurate metaphor for how a narcissist uses triangulation and divide to rule and maintain coercive control.”

As a shadow work and narcissistic abuse recovery coach, I see the aftermath of such abuse every single day.

The hardest truth to swallow is that you cannot win by becoming the toughest rat in the well. You only win by recognizing the well, refusing the bait, and setting an impenetrable boundary against the farmer.

– Therapist Unknown

My friend also wrote to me this….

“If narcissistic abuse wasn’t a thing there wouldn’t be literally thousands of us, from so many different countries, religious backgrounds and genders, all posting and seeking therapy for the same things: near identical experiences with these predators, these perpetrators. Don’t let anyone invalidate your lived experience. The more awareness we raise about how these individuals operate, the safer our world will be…..”

The Narcissistic Spectrum: Narcissism is on a spectrum, and people can move along the continuum of narcissistic traits over time. The spectrum starts with accentuated narcissistic qualities, then moves towards borderline narcissism. From there the spectrum goes to subclinical narcissism, and finishes with clinical narcissism.

The Four Subtypes: Narcissism has four subtypes: grandiose, vulnerable, communal and malignant. Diagnosing narcissism is mostly for expert clinicians and psychiatrists. They use a series of questionnaires (using the DSM-5-TR and the MMPI-3), have studied pathology and have practical experience with personality disorders. In assessing where people are on the spectrum, clinicians consider how debilitating the patient’s pathology has become. They ask questions like: Can the narcissist work? Have their relationships with friends and family members suffered? Can they apologize? Can they hold themselves accountable?

Another consideration when diagnosing narcissism is how long patterns have existed for the narcissist. My father’s patterns have existed my entire lifetime. Because of this, I believe he’s somewhere between subclinical and clinical.

Without self-awareness, accountability, and a sustained self effort to change through psychotherapy, a person with significant narcissistic traits will have difficulty moving towards the healthier end of the narcissistic spectrum.

This podcast episode really covers the question about whether narcissism is nature (hereditary), nurture (abuse), or both.

I seriously doubt my mother ever knew that my father was a narcissist. My mother was diagnosed in 1991 with Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS. She was 47 when diagnosed, and passed when she was 49. I only knew my mom one way – as the strongest and most caring person I’ve ever known. My mom married an alcoholic narcissist and successfully raised two children while unbeknownst to her, her partner was trying to setup the classic narcissistic golden child / scapegoat dynamic. I think few before her have successfully been able to hold a marriage together while raising children under the same circumstances.

My mother knew my father was an alcoholic, but I don’t think she knew he was a narcissist. My guess is, if she had lived into her fifties, she would have figured him out.

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My father started targeting me when I was a kid. Like I wrote in the post titled “The Golden Child and the Scapegoat,” my father positioned himself over me and provoked me into lashing out at him so he could play the victim. When I was younger, my father tried to portray me as dumb or stupid. Most of the time, my father would do this with me when we were one-on-one. But occasionally he would try this with me in front of my mother and she would take him away from me and argue with him behind closed doors.

Once, when my family had borrowed my grandparents’ motorhome, we were all driving across Idaho when it broke down along the side of the road. My father needed another set of hands to help him turn some bolts or screws, and my mother said, “Take Tyler with you.” My father immediately lashed out: “Tyler doesn’t even know his right from his left.” My mother yelled back at him and it became an intense verbal fight.

Because of the tight confines of the motorhome, and the stressful nature of the vehicle’s breakdown, my father’s shaming and my mother’s shield all played out in front of me. I remember simultaneously feeling my mother’s love and experiencing what it meant to be targeted by a narcissist. I titled this post “A Familiar Story” because this happened to me all the time.

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There have been several things over the course of my life that, like my mother, protected me from my father’s targeting in strange and sometimes contradictory ways. The first, obviously, was my mother. After she died, my father’s advancing alcoholism may have protected me in a bizarre way as well. Alcohol clouded his thinking, made his behavior more chaotic and disorganized, and ultimately made him less effective and deliberate in his attacks. He was simply too much of a mess himself to target anyone with precision or consistency.

Then, of course, I went no contact, which protected me in the most direct way possible: I removed myself from his reach. But looking back over the years, I have also begun to see my Aunt Shy in a more complicated light. I believe she enabled my father, and I still believe her role in our family was ultimately destructive to my brother and me. At the same time, however, she provided my father with enormous amounts of validation and, in narcissistic terms, supply. In doing so, she may have satisfied enough of his emotional needs that he had less reason to come after me – or less of a reason to be destructive in general. In a strange, enabling kind of way, my Aunt Shy may have kept my father from doing a lot more harm. Did she? Or would he have just been outed earlier as an abusive father? I guess that’s the enabling dilemma.

A lot of narcissists are hoarders. My father is both. This is relevant because of the interesting narcissistic concept called “self-object functioning.”

Self-object functioning means a person relies on another person to perform psychological functions that help maintain their own sense of self. A narcissistic person may target someone for control and compliance because that person performs an important self-object function – regulating the narcissist’s self-esteem, identity, or sense of power.

In a striking parallel, a person who hoards may be unable to relinquish possessions because those objects also help the hoarding narcissist to again regulate their sense of self, providing identity, security, or emotional regulation.

It may appear ironic to those family members reading this that all my life I’ve been the one consistently pushing for and advocating for healthier relationships within my family. Whether it was me breaking through the denial surrounding my family’s disease of alcoholism 15 years ago and telling my brother, Colby, that I was going to fight for our family’s sobriety with or without him; holding my father and brother accountable for their unhealthy and toxic behaviors, or now identifying narcissism in our family, I have continually advocated for healthier communications, interactions, and boundaries between the three of us. I’ve lived with NPD in my family without knowing it my entire life. Now? I just want to live in peace.

Part of me feels empathy, sadness, and compassion for my father and brother. But there’s an important question to ask here: When does a victim of NPD become a perpetrator? If initially a narcissist is a victim in childhood, they eventually move to become the perpetrator abusing others and causing great harm throughout family systems. I believe the victim becomes a perpetrator at awareness. Awareness begins when someone confronts the narcissist or seriously questions if they’re on the narcissistic spectrum. Studies show narcissists know what they are doing. They know the harm they are causing but do it anyway because it provides them favor. They’re great at justifying their abusive behaviors. This to me is a form of awareness. But when someone puts all the pieces together for the narcissist, and the narcissist still abuses others, maybe their own children, they’re perpetrators. Awareness is the point for me when the narcissist moves from victim to perpetrator.

In the summer of 2026, I confronted both my father and brother about their covert, communal and vulnerable narcissism. They couldn’t respond to my claims (narcissists run from accountability). But regardless of their response, their awareness clock began ticking in the summer of 2026. I made sure of that. They may have been made aware prior by other people, but to be sure, they were definitely made aware of their narcissism in the summer of 2026.

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In July of ’26, I invited my brother, Colby, to spend two days with me in Monterey, walking the beaches and talking about our childhood. Colby expressed interest and said maybe he’d meet with me down the road. I was skeptical then and remain skeptical at the time of this writing. Why? The invite to Monterey is about self-reflection and accountability. If you study narcissism, it’s a safe bet Colby will never actually make it to Monterey.

Narcissists don’t believe they need to change their ways. Colby knows I’m aware both he and my father are narcissists. He knows the topic of our Monterey meeting and narcissists don’t want to change. They justify their abuses, rely on portraying themselves as misunderstood, and hope to continue their abusive behaviors, business as usual. But what happens to the narcissist once they’ve been exposed?

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The most shocking thing I’ve learned while studying narcissism is that narcissists develop targets and if they don’t get compliance from the target, whether that target is their own child or not, they try to destroy that target. This still boggles my mind to think a father would do that to his son – a parent to their child.

“When a narcissist develops a target, they seek to destroy that target if they don’t receive compliance, cooperation, submission, or control over that person. Over the course of their life, they often continuously escalate their efforts.” I think of Francisco Goya’s gruesome painting, Saturn Devouring his Son.

My father won’t be able to destroy me but I’ve had enough of it. Even at 82 years old, I can still see him trying to damage my relationships. He’s threatened to disown me and write me out of his will. Maybe he already has. For me, though, I’m relieved. I’d rather know about the narcissistic thread that runs through my family and be written out of my family will than receive inheritance through compliance and remain blind to their pathology. Those two issues, however, shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

Once you understand narcissism, the targeting reads like a playbook. It’s easy to anticipate a narcissist’s next move.

I’ll be waiting for the next round of flying monkeys….

Narcissists die how they live: ugly. I believe this is because of resentments. Narcissists are deeply resentful and grow more resentful as they age.

Some narcissist grow up in homes marked by genuine abuse, neglect, or instability, while others are shaped by chronic overvaluation, excessive phrase (the golden child), entitlement, or inconsistent parenting. Despite these very different developmental paths, both narcissistic children can arrive at the same place: a worldview organized around resentment. Those who experienced real abuse may magnify or continually relive those injuries, while those without significant abuse may reinterpret otherwise ordinary childhood experiences as profound injustices that did not occur the way they remember. Both paths, however, carry resentments into adulthood, filtering present-day relationships through them and reinforcing the belief they are uniquely misunderstood or mistreated. As they grow older, these resentments often become more entrenched and increasingly central to their identity.

Aside from their resentments, other things happen to narcissists as they age. First, they lose their cognitive function so their powers of deceit, divisiveness and coercive control become more obvious to previously innocent bystanders. Secondly, their sources of supply diminish. They may lose other rescuers or protectors to death (Aunt Shy), lose their authority within the family, their independence, their targets, or social attention.

Some narcissistic behaviors to lookout for as the narcissist ages are manufacturing crises, exaggerating catastrophes, threatening to disinherit family members, returning to old addictions, 5150 holds, intensifying smear campaigns, provoking new conflicts, leaning harder into victimhood, creating new dependencies, or recruiting new flying monkeys.

If you’re a family member I’ve been estranged from for decades, or an old childhood friend who has experienced this with my father, or maybe another aging narcissist, I’m sorry. The only thing I can really offer you now is knowledge, and the hope it helps you recognize these issues earlier than I did.

Why is my father holding a fist up like this? I always thought it was weird. I now think it’s the vulnerable narcissist, unable for most of his life to achieve grandiosity, feeling grandiose. Atta boy.

Narcissistic coercive control is a pattern of psychological abuse involving manipulation, intimidation and punishment used to dominate another person or other people, restrict their autonomy, and maintain power over them.

A narcissistic parent uses coercive control over their children early on to regulate their own fragile sense of self by attempting to keep their children psychologically subordinate, even into adulthood, hoping to maintain a reliable source of selfobject functioning.

Common examples of narcissistic coercive control are isolation, gaslighting, DARVO, threats around inheritance, undermining and intermittent rewards.

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I’m proud that around the time I got to middle school I stopped buying my father’s toxic and abusive bullshit. Through my mother’s guidance, love and patience, I saw a different reality. After my mother’s passing, I went “No Contact” with my father.

From my mother’s death in ’93, I’ve had roughly 27 years of peace without my father in my life. That said, it’s fascinating (and also terrifying) how deeply the coercive control / trauma bound still affects me even now at 53 years old. If you don’t know what narcissistic emotional dysregulation is, I’m here to tell you it’s very real.

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My ex girlfriend used to routinely tell me I was “overbound.” It was a term her therapist used to describe someone with high walls or overly strong boundaries. I didn’t completely understand why I was overbounded, but I knew she was right. Now I see it wasn’t just that my dad, brother and aunt overstepped, it was because they used flying monkeys to attack my boundaries. Despite my best efforts to “bar the door,” the flying monkeys kept getting through.

The term flying monkey, commonly used in discussions around narcissistic abuse, comes from The Wizard of OZ. The Wicked Witch of the West sends her flying monkeys after Dorothy to get her ruby slippers. In the world of narcissism, the narcissist sends out its flying monkey to do the narcissist’s bidding. If your narcissist is running low on supply, and you’re their target like I was, watch out for the flying monkeys!

My father had multiple flying monkeys he sent after me, two of which were my brother (the golden child), and Bob Moore, my father’s childhood friend. Bob Moore was an aggressive flying monkey whereas Colby was more of a subtle con artist. Both, though, were reporting back to my father, as good flying monkeys do.

Bob would text me for years attempts at guilt and shame, just as my father did before Bob. I would delete Bob’s texts, not knowing about NPD or flying monkeys, but knowing it was all toxic.

I would later mention to my father how weak it was to send Bob Moore to do his bidding. My father just nervously laughed. I showed Bob Moore’s texts to my brother once and my brother’s response was, “That’s chickenshit,” which is ironic considering my brother was my father’s primary flying monkey, using trust to get through my boundaries and over my barricades.

To illustrate this point, one experience stands out. From roughly 2016 until the end of the pandemic, I was in a relationship with a wonderful woman who was independently wealthy. So that we could travel and enjoy life together, I made the mistake of walking away from both of my sources of income – flying fishing and real estate. When my relationship ended with her shortly after the pandemic, I suddenly found myself needing to rebuild both businesses during a period after the pandemic of high inflation and economic uncertainty. In short, I was financially and emotionally vulnerable. In normal families, that’s a good time for the love of the family to engage. That’s when the love and the support kick in, right? But not with narcissists. For them, that’s high leverage: that’s a good time to attack.

During the preceding five years of my relationship with her, my father and I never spoke. Yet within a month after my breakup, when I was at the peak of my emotional and financial vulnerability, my father unexpectedly, out of the blue, sent me a text promising what he described as an “early inheritance.” The timing here was not a coincidence. I didn’t know what a flying monkey was then, but I knew this was fishy. My brother was the only one who was in contact with both my father and me. So, he was the only one who could have told my father about my breakup, and my emotional and financial vulnerability. That’s a narcissist’s flying monkey.

My relationship with an independently wealthy woman had insulated me from their coercive control. But once my relationship ended, that insulation disappeared. For five years, my father and brother had been running low on Tyler juice, kept at a distance by the relationship that stood between us. Now that relationship was over, the five-year drought was effectively over too: their supply was back within reach, and they had an opportunity to pounce.

Although I was reluctant, I responded to my father’s text and took his inheritance bait. But the inheritance (I see now predictably) was a lie. I called my father. Despite not talking and being estranged from my father the previous six or seven years, my father showed no interest in my life or what I had been doing the years prior. Instead, he systematically reopened old wounds (emotional dysregulation) until I was nearly unable to speak. The little I was able to say came out as a brag telling him, “I’m ten years sober.” Instead of my father saying, “That’s great, I’m proud of you,” his response was, “Well, I guess that’s another thing you’re better than me at.” At this point in my life, I shouldn’t have been dumbfounded by this, but I was. Now I understand: Narcissists are competitive in weird ways and they’re threatened by odd things.

During the phone conversation, my nervous system became so overwhelmed that I felt emotionally paralyzed, barely able to get words out of my mouth. I was 48 years old. By the end of the phone conversation, I was openly sobbing and my father was actually happy. He couldn’t conceal his joy. He was completely resupplied. He had gotten what he came for. A month later, he sent only a small fraction of the inheritance he promised.

It’s well documented in clinical literature that narcissistic parents engage in behaviors that chronically, emotionally dysregulate their children, even into adulthood, particularly their life-long targets or scapegoats.

The timing and the coercive control are what stand out the most to me. My brother, the flying monkey, had informed my father I was emotionally and financially vulnerable.

My emotional reaction afterward, including a rage-filled letter months later, only played right into my father’s hands. It gave him more narcissistic supply, able to again act as the victim distorting facts. In events like this, my brother also received communal narcissistic supply, playing the rescuer while reinforcing his role as the golden child.

Part of this story illustrates a system of coercive control I was trapped in with two narcissists. But the other part of the story reveals how unresolved childhood trauma can hijack the nervous system, creating emotional dysregulation in the target, allowing the narcissists to exploit further.

I’m grateful, though, that I’m not a narcissist. My mother gave me the gift of self. That self may be fractured by narcissistic abuse, but it remains, and it’s repairable.

D.A.R.V.O. stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim, Offender.

When I first learned about DARVO it was a gut punch. I watched a Youtube video on it and went back over the video multiple times. My father is the DARVO King.

As a child, I would sometimes start a conversation or talk in a normal, civil, loving way to my father and his response would be to provoke me when nobody was watching. My response was to cry or get angry. Later, as I stood up to him, he would respond as the victim and not tell his rescuers what he had done to provoke me in the first place. This has gone on my entire life, with his attacks becoming more effective in sobriety.

In my experience, the “D” (Deny) in DARVO was impossible to recognize in early childhood, not because it wasn’t happening, but because I rarely witnessed it directly. From an early age, I was conditioned to accept my father’s version of reality, so I seldom questioned or accused him of wrongdoing in the first place, making his denials unnecessary. At other times, when my mother would witness his attacks, she would intervene to protect me. The conflict then shifted from me to the relationship between my parents, leaving me unaware of how he responded to being confronted. I remember vivid instances when my father would attack me psychologically with shame and my mother would intervene. Most of the time, though, she would take him away from me, into the bedroom, and my mother would fight off the narcissist for me, while counseling my father or even, perhaps, validating him.

Looking back, I can see that during my childhood I consistently experienced covert narcissistic attacks from my father, fueled by his insecurities and fragile sense of self, along with his attempts at DARVO.

A narcissistic trauma bond between a parent and a child is a powerful emotional attachment formed through a recurring cycle of manipulation, abuse, hope, and intermittent approval that causes the child to remain psychologically connected to the narcissistic parent despite the abuse.

When I think of trauma bonding with my father, I think of one word: “Hope.” If there’s hope, the trauma bond stays alive. Narcissists use hope embedded in the trauma bond as a way to maintain coercive control.

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The victim of narcissistic abuse carries the trauma bond within their nervous system for life.

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This trauma bond creates emotional dysregulation in the victim. Emotional dysregulation resulting from narcissistic abuse is the victim’s difficulty regulating emotions after repeated cycles of abuse. It causes intense and unpredictable feelings, particularly in response to the narcissistic person’s behavior.

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Narcissistic abuse > trauma bond > emotional dysregulation = coercive control

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Fortunately for me, I went decades without speaking to my father. I would block his emails, calls and texts, and I would “bar the door” so he couldn’t attack or trigger me. I didn’t know he possessed this odd power over me with his abusive trauma bond, coercive control, and emotional dysregulation, but toxic behavior in general isn’t hard to identify as you get older. Occasionally, though, I would drop my guard and let him through the door. After years of no contact I would “HOPE” my father had gotten help, sober, seen a therapist – maybe something in his life had changed for the better. So I’d let him through my boundaries. Sometimes Colby, the flying monkey, would also let me father through my boundaries, unbeknownst to me.

I later learned that victims somewhat stabilize or re-stabilize naturally after experiencing narcissistic abuse (a.k.a. trauma-bond triggering). Victims of narcissistic abuse do this by creating distance from the narcissist, calming their nervous systems, returning to familiar routines, sleeping, exercising, spending time with healthy people, and allowing the emotional intensity to gradually subside. Over time, this gives the brain and body a chance to process the experience, regain perspective, and restore emotional equilibrium without deliberate therapeutic intervention.

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Like all narcissists, my father had his good and bad days, his good and bad months. When he was fully supplied, he could almost appear human. When admired, in control, validated, he seemed warm, generous, funny and maybe even emotionally available.

But when his tank was empty, though, that’s when my father went looking for targets. That’s when the games started: the victimhood, the shaming, the coercive control, embarrassing behaviors for attention, or devaluing people. His unpredictability for me was confusing. It sometimes created hope in me when I was younger, and hope, as I’ve written in the past, is the most important part of the trauma bond. If you hope things will get better, you stick around.

After the Lee family all got sober in 2011, I had a great deal of “hope” that our family lives would begin to normalize. Maybe we’d celebrate milestones, get together for the holidays, or we’d call each other on our birthdays. Maybe we’d return to the family of love and support I lived with while my mother was alive. This renewed hope, born in sobriety, is what kept my trauma bond to my father alive.

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During my adolescence, I had no meaningful way to escape the relationship with my father and the relationship’s subsequent trauma. The psychological abuse kept my nervous system in a chronic state of threat and hypervigilance. I didn’t spit in my dad’s face in junior high, run away from home repeatedly in high school, or knock out his front tooth during a fight because I was simply a “bad kid.” That isn’t my nature. I was being intentionally provoked by a narcissistic parent. My actions were conditioned, reactive behaviors that occurred in the context of ongoing provocation and my chronically dysregulated stress response.

As Colossians 3:21 warns, “Fathers, do no provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.”

“A picture is worth a thousand words” – Fred R. Barnard.

I had clearly been crying before this picture was taken, and my father appears satisfied in some odd way.

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When our nervous systems detects that something is unsafe, we enter into several survival or defensive responses: fight, flight, freeze or fawn. However, if you are living with a narcissist and they’re secretly targeting you, you stay in a chronic state of hyperarousal or defensive activation.

My primary response to chronic trauma caused by my father’s provocations in high school was to fight. In high school, I fought everyone and I didn’t care. I didn’t care about your size, your age, or how many friends you had. But I also had other maladaptive coping strategies to deal with an abusive parent. As an adolescent I turned not only to fighting, but also to sex and drugs. Most kids do this in some form, but not to the extent I did.

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After my mother passed, knowing inherently my father was toxic without even knowing what narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) was, I went “no contact” with my father. I’m glad I did. For some people, no contact means significantly less impairment later in life.

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.

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.