IT IS NOT UNCOMMON FOR NARCISSISTS to manipulate others into relationships by making fraudulent claims about who they are, what they stand for, and by mirroring the goals of the targeted individual.
They deliberately make promises they don’t intend to keep and spin webs of deception for the sole purpose of exploiting the target and their resources.
In popular psychology, this deceptive tactic is called future faking. Narcissists profess a desire to build a long-term relationship with the target to obtain short term gain.
Once the target has extended trust to a narcissist, their good faith is weaponized and used to access their assets, e.g. sex, connections, status, goods, and services.
The narcissist’s agenda
Narcissists enter relationships with a self-serving agenda. In their estimation, whenever they interact with another person, they are either gaining power or losing it.
Once they have made up their mind to exploit someone, they disguise their malicious intentions by mimicking love for the person they are targeting.
Early in the relationship, they spend hours asking the target about their hopes, dreams, and goals. The target mistakes this for interest when, in fact, the narcissist is data mining to discover the target’s likes and dislikes. With this information, the narcissist can craft a tailor-made false persona in the image of the target’s soul mate.
Misled by the narcissist’s pretense, the target invests themselves and their resources in the relationship. They may move in with the narcissist, marry them, and have children with them. All the while, though the narcissist is going through the motions, they remain detached.
The discard phase of the narcissistic abuse cycle
The discard phase of the narcissistic abuse cycle often comes as a complete shock to the narcissist’s partner. While they are blindsided by the narcissist’s betrayal, the biggest shock is the ease with which some narcissists abandon their progeny.
So why do some narcissists discard their children?
The reasons why may be rooted in the narcissist’s dysfunctional family of origin. These are high conflict family units with power imbalances, rampant denial, low empathy, and little to no boundaries.
In a narcissistic family, there will be a lot of psycho-emotional abuse and coercive and controlling behaviors. Anger, hypocrisy, envy, and betrayal contaminate the ecosystem beneath the façade. The toxicity between the caregivers trickles down to their children.
Why dysfunctional families discard their own
Children not accepted or loved for who they are in a narcissistic family. They live in a gaslit reality where the only love they receive is conditional upon their performance in the roles assigned to them by the narcissistic caregiver(s).
In a dysfunctional family, these roles are:
- The Caretaker – this child is given adult responsibilities at a young age and parentified.
- The Hero/The Golden Child – this child tries to make the family seem normal and trouble free.
- The Lost Child – this child is introverted and flies under the radar.
- The Mascot/The Clown – this child distracts from the issues in the family,
- The Manipulator/The Mastermind – this child is an opportunist who exploits the vulnerabilities in the family to serve their own needs.
- The Rebel/Problem Child – this child acts out the families dysfunction and is frequently punished.
The Scapegoat/Black Sheep/Truth Teller is an alternate version of The Rebel and is distinguished by the fact that they are innocent and wrongfully blamed for all of the dysfunction in the family.
Why do narcissists discard their children?
Narcissists may discard their children when the child poses a threat to the narcissist’s narrative or the narcissist’s false self.
In Summary
When a narcissist discards a innocent child it’s likely that the child has been cast in the painful role of family scapegoat because they are not like the narcissistic parent(s).
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