What happens to GC when SG leaves?

[oak_tree]

Hi all,

A bit of background: My SO and his stb uNPDxW have two kids, both teenagers. The elder (SG but defended her mother 99.9% of the time) recently left home. GC son is reserved, has walls up, and lives at his uNPD mom's ~80% of the time. He apparently deals with his mom's "panic attacks" by hiding outside until they're over, and they're "not usually directed at him". 

nMom's a covert, unemployed, has very few/no friends, does not take care of herself physically, the world is against her, everyone else is stupid, etc. She and SO are NC except through lawyers.

So my question is, what have people experienced in these kinds of cases when GC leaves? Will nMom turn on GC? Or will she just love-bomb him continually? Will she get tired of him?

[Penny Lane]

I don't have personal experience of this exact situation. But from what I have seen, and from what we've seen from others on this board, my educated guess is that she will sort of flip flop on the GC. Sometimes he'll be golden child with all her good attention focused on him, sometimes he'll be the scapegoat of her bad moods.

Needless to say this is very hard for a kid, they never know if they're going to have good mom or bad mom. It's almost better to have the stability of the defined roles.

I'm sorry you're facing this uncertainty and I hope it ends up being OK. Come back and let us know what you're seeing!

[Pepin]

I was the SG in my family.  My brother was the GC primarily because of his gender and because he excelled at school and in his activities.  NF couldn't get enough of that of course.  When I started to pull away, things began to change for my brother.  He was starting to get tossed around against our sister who actually is a rather quiet "back up" kind of GC.  Eventually my brother had enough of being poked at and became the fallen GC.  Our father was extremely cruel toward my brother and wounded him pretty badly.  Our sister on the other hand is not headed in a good direction and we have to be very careful around her.     

[Call Me Cordelia]

I was the SG. I have a much younger sister. What Penny Lane describes is pretty much what happened to her. I left for college and almost never came back, and she became a SG/GC combination.  She was still a child when I was 18. My abuse-induced autoimmune disease, which was Munchausened-by-proxy to be much bigger than it actually was, got much much better. A couple of years after that, this same sister gets a different but similar diagnosis to the one I had, which conveniently debilitates her from doing normal age-appropriate things and furthering the enmeshment with uNM.

Into her adulthood, sis felt entitled to have me rescue her and enable all her learned helplessness and become a proxy parent for her, as I was when she was a very young child. She blamed me for "abandoning" her to deal with mom and dad alone, rather than blaming mom and dad for being bad parents. 

I expect there is simultaneously wide variation and familiar patterns on this question among families like ours. Like in the Matrix, there were maybe nine possible backstories but the origin and purpose for all of them is the same.

[Hazy111]

As previously stated the GC can become the SG, as theres no one else around to "split" with and receive the negative "projections" . So the GC receives cops it both ways. Very destabilising. I experienced this. I was a combination of GC/Lost Child. Enmeshed and ignored. Only useful to buttress PD mothers fragile psyche. Then SG left home.

NB The GC doesnt receive love in the conditional sense . GCs are abused differently to SGs . Often GCs dont realise they are being emotionally abused. Often they are "forced teamed " by the parent and so side with them against the SG. If they dont, then they risk being SGed to, so they conform. Rather like the school/work bully and his acolytes/enablers.

It often takes GCs many years to realise they were abused to, some never do and defend "mother/father" to the grave.

[oak_tree]

Thank you all (and SO passes on his thanks as well).

I'm hoping DSS's good critical thinking skills let him recognise the patterns he used to see with his nMom and sister, if nMom does start flipping his roles. I guess our job is, as always, to give him at least one reliable household.