Relationships: The Narcissist and his Golden Child

Anyone who has been involved with a narcissist is acutely aware of his many perverted and distorted views. This is apparent also in his own immediate circle of people including his own children and often they choose one child as their ‘Golden Child’.

Narcissists tend to follow the same patterns and are fairly predictable so I am certain many of you will be able to relate to my own experiences of the narcissist with whom I was in a turbulent relationship for three years, on and off.

The narcissist projects his grandiosity upon the child from an early age. They are an extension of themselves and are there to make the narcissist feel good about themselves, to fill their emptiness and to achieve what the narcissist did not or  will not achieve themselves. They actually live through them whilst being emotionally suffocated.

He was a single parent, his wife having left the marital home a couple of years previously.I was introduced to them and spent much time with them and early on it was his relationship with his eldest child that was most disturbing. He had told me so much about her..she seemed to be his favourite topic of conversation....not much at all about the others though.

He had  never been lonely in the evenings since his wife left, he had told me, because once the others were in bed, he would spend the evenings watching television with the golden child or helping her with homework. She did not have a bedtime as such but they would usually go to bed at around the same time. In the mornings she would often take charge of the household and become physical with the others if they annoyed her in any way. When I pointed this out to him on several occasions, he would laugh and say as the eldest she was entitled to which was very contradictory as he would state any physical punishments were abhorrent to him. I learnt early on that any criticism, even though it was constructive and with pure intentions, was met with hostility and ridicule so I decided to stay quiet after a while. Once the unpleasant devaluing stage had arrived, I was always second to them who had seemed to blend into one.

She was a quiet child out of the home and had little in the way of any friends or social skills. She adored her father and followed him from room to room, throwing her arms around him and showering him with compliments, doing anything and everything to please him. If he was out of the house she would text him constantly with declarations of how much she loved and missed him and all of this fed his ego. She even developed a default strong West Country accent as he often expressed his wish to relocate there and often talked in baby voices. Again, he revelled in this and would exclaim how sweet and good she was in comparison to the others. 

He was very proud of her because she looked like him, had the same mannerisms and acted like him. He liked certain film characters and so did she. He liked only certain programmes and so did she. She dressed like him, they had a shelf each in the bathroom, they ate the same food and often went to the gym together. To the narcissist she did not have many friends as she was ‘too good for them’...like he believed he was too good for people also! In three years, I saw nothing of her own unique personality traits which is such a shame. Everything was done through his eyes and not her own. If he was happy, she was happy but I know that deep down she couldn’t be happy as she was existing only to be another replica version of her father. 

The other children were sadly aware that she had always been his favourite but just accepted it. She could be rude, mean,spiteful and often quite cruel but all was done in a very manipulative way( just like him) but he chose to see none of this and would become angry and defensive if anything was even slightly mentioned, blaming the others instead.

During his regular prolonged silent treatments towards me, she would do exactly the same, only to follow it up with the fact that she missed me and loves me so much, once he had decided to speak to me again...with him saying exactly the same things!

I think I saw my role was to fix them all and to bring happiness and authenticity to a broken family who were in a very toxic situation but realise now that I was just exhausting myself and as narcissists do not change, the situation would not have changed ever.

Unfortunately, the damage done by the narcissist is likely irreversible unless intensive therapy is sought in the future as neither believed anything was wrong in their environment and by shunning normality and healthy family dynamics the golden child will sadly become traumatised and often narcissistic themselves and I still worry about the effects on the other children. 

Being an empath in a relationship with a narcissist, I ended up giving all my energy away which he took for himself and his golden child  in an unsettling triangulation tactic aimed to belittle and invalidate my authentic, empathic true self.

The good news is I am now fully healed and I will write more about how I achieved  this in a future post.