As many of us from narcissistic cult families are painfully aware, the golden child sits at the top of the hierarchy, granted entitlements denied to others, especially the scapegoat. In the harsh social Darwinist logic of the narcissistic home, the golden child is praised, privileged, and propped up by a disturbed and often similarly privileged narcissistic parent and other fearful and/or morally underdeveloped enabling members of the family. Caught in binary absolutist thinking (psychological splitting between all-good and all-bad), narcissists vacillate between extremes of grandiose idealization and devaluation in how they see themselves and others. There is no middle ground. In simple terms, favoritism in a narcissistic family system reflects this binary. Traumatized (like the rest of the family) while also groomed with grandiose self-importance and unearned entitlement, the family golden child is most likely to take on the narcissistic personality pattern and repeat the generational cycle of relational domination and trauma. Let’s review the major features of the narcissistic personality pattern.

25 Features of the Narcissistic Personality

  1. early attachment trauma, often exacerbated by additional forms of trauma
  2. shame, rage, and relational alienation
  3. deficits in neurological development and integration
  4. wounding to the right brain hemisphere leading to left-brain dominance
  5. inability to distinguish the self from others (extreme self-referentiality)
  6. emotional dysregulation
  7. deficits in empathy
  8. dissociation from and contempt for vulnerability
  9. poor identity individuation
  10. externalized self-esteem regulation
  11. binary and hierarchical thinking
  12. vacillations between idealization and devaluation of self and others
  13. low self-awareness and underdeveloped observing ego
  14. projection of inner experience onto external reality
  15. delusions of superiority, entitlement, and victimhood/persecution
  16. chronic distortions, denials, and projections of reality
  17. cognitive dissonance and rage when faced with alternative views or noncompliance
  18. vicious morality
  19. lack of interpersonal integrity and accountability
  20. disregard for boundaries
  21. relational control, competition, and exploitation
  22. dominance displays (overt and/or covert)
  23. incapacity for trust, love, or intimacy
  24. common co-morbid conditions such as addiction, ADHD, and OCD
  25. social masking

What Is Happening in America?

Narcissism is a severe mental illness, often well-masked, and the damage it does to marriages, children, and families over generations is devastating. But the harm of the narcissistic cult is not limited to the relationship or family. What happens on the micro level also plays out on the societal level—in churches, schools, businesses, media, corporations, nations, governments, and any other place where humans create community. The micro and the macro reverberate in self-reinforcing feedback loops bottom up and top down, entrenching patterns of relational alienation and trauma that operate virally and breed more of the same. What we see in a narcissistic person—the dysregulated nervous system and relationally estranged left-dominant brain that seeks to regulate itself externally through self-aggrandizement, social dominance, and projection of disowned parts of the self onto vulnerable others, is what we see on steroids in a fascist regime. Authoritarian leaders, like authoritarians at home, create power hierarchies and subject those around them to extreme forms of control, violation, scapegoating, exploitation, projection, disavowals of responsibility, and rationalizations of often staggering cruelty. What looks vicious, delusional, and dangerous to the collective good in a healthy society becomes normalized in a narcissistic one: ecocide, marginalized mothers, emotional illiteracy, inequity, materialism, and unprocessed collective trauma from systemic violence against socially scapegoated groups, including women and indigenous, black, brown, and LGBTQ+ Americans. European Christian colonizers brought their narcissism to a land already inhabited by many hundreds of nations of peoples with their own complex languages, spiritual belief systems, cultural practices, roads, farming, mathematics, technologies, art, politics, and ecological understandings. Aggressive, arrogant, and materialistic, the colonizers projected their own primitivism onto the cultures they encountered, labeling them savages to justify a genocide whose legacy continues today. And to accelerate the construction of their “civilization,” they kidnapped and enslaved Africans in a system so brutal it served as a model for Hitler’s persecution of Jews, LGBTQ+, and disabled citizens in 20th century Europe. Using the false construct of whiteness and the lie of racial superiority, and modeled on a punishing patriarchal Christian god, America was founded on the oppressed backs of enslaved blacks, indigenous peoples, and women. Having never healed nor even fully acknowledged our own history and its legacy, Americans should not be surprised that our narcissistic cult golden children—white nationalist “Christian” males—are still running the show. Neurologically dysregulated, emotionally illiterate, relationally alienated, and convinced of their supremacy over others whose humanity they are unwilling to recognize but whose exploitation they rely on to survive, angry white men in America, wearing the shoddy veil of Christian piety, are leading us headlong into authoritarianism and planetary disaster. If that sounds like hyperbole, read Project 2025.

Fascist Manifesto Project 2025

Project 2025 describes itself as “an agenda . . . to arm the next conservative president . . . against the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.'” Published under the title Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the 920-page manifesto would put anyone to sleep if its message weren’t so lethal. As its authors make relentlessly clear, they prefer to remain asleep—or, more to the point, to have the rest of us remain asleep—to reality. Here are some of the realities Project 2025 contemptuously denies: climate change, ecological depletion and collapse, the rights and autonomy of girls and women, systemic racism, LGBTQ+ identity, the oppression of the working class, academic and scientific expertise, and the need for separation of church and state, regulatory oversight, the rule of law, governmental checks and balances, and the list goes on, and on. Care about ecological survival, democracy, education, equity, science, free press, and institutions like Medicare, the Environmental Protection Agency, or even the National Weather Service? Project 2025 and its anointed leader, the fantastically narcissistic Donald Trump, promises to take a wrecking ball to all of it. Our children are our witnesses. If you want to shut down Project 2025, wake up, stand up, and fight right now. The only thing that works with the morally unaccountable is consequences. Julie L. Hall is the author of The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free, Hachette Books. She is working on a new book about relational trauma, moral development, and societal narcissism. 

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