This is how they keep up the illusion. They keep children around not out of love, but out of necessity, through obligation and guilt. Why do they keep them around? Well, they need them to maintain their image. They need them to extract sympathy, to serve as props in their never-ending performance of being good people. But the most tragic part is that the children, unfortunately, believe it too—for a while. The golden child believes they are special until the moment they fall from grace. And when that happens, I can tell you they experience an ego death. I have worked with a couple of them, so I can tell you. The scapegoat believes they’re unlovable because that is what they have been conditioned to accept.
And both, unfortunately, grow up feeling deeply, profoundly confused. Because on some level, they remember those public moments—the moments when the narcissistic parent smiled, hugged them, and spoke well of them. The moments where, for just a second, it seemed like maybe, just maybe, they were loved. But then they remember the rest: the way their needs were ignored, the way they were emotionally discarded when no one was watching, the way they never felt safe.
This is my story with my mother. I always excused her as the sacrificing mom, but she actually sacrificed me in myriad ways. That is the truth of the narcissistic parent: the love is a performance, and the child is a tool. The world may never see it, but the child lives it. And when that child finally breaks free and begins to heal, they realize something even more chilling: the parent never truly saw them as a person—only as a reflection, only as a means to an end. And that’s why the love was never real, because they were never real to the narcissist—only a role to be played, a puppet to be controlled, a trophy to be displayed.
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