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ARTICLE by Tereza Pultarova
Being a family scapegoat: Is acceptance and healing possible?
The journey to acceptance for victims of family scapegoating is long and complicated. The journey to healing, I dare to say, is even more challenging.
There are several hurdles the victim has to overcome to reach full acceptance. All these hurdles have to do with hope that some form of reconciliation might be possible, that reparations can be made, that the scapegoating family members could realize how they wronged the scapegoat and that they have the capacity to regret their behaviour. In short, these hurdles have to do with the hope that despite all that has passed, the scapegoating family members somehow do care.
Letting go of a part of your life is tough
It is not a small ask to expect a person to just let go of all familial connections, of the environment that shaped them and formed the backdrop of their formative years, no matter how dysfunctional. For a child or a young person, that family was all they had, it had been their entire world. And in most dysfunctional families, the bad would be interspersed with some good.
Intermittent reinforcement
This sprinkling of good memories among the bad makes the process of letting go even harder. It functions like that proverbial breadcrumbing frequently utilized by narcissistic abusers. It binds the scapegoat to the scapegoater through that wicked mechanism of intermittent reinforcement. (I’m sure you’ve heard about those experiments with rats in a cage.)
And so, the recovering scapegoat will be going through phases of genuine longing for those lost good moments.
When we are dealing with family scapegoating, we are dealing with serious mental health issues on the side of the scapegoaters that might not be obvious to external observers. The scapegoat’s confusion and complicated emotions towards the scapegoaters are an imprint of those scapegoating family members’ mental reality. It is them who created that confusion, often deliberately, with their unpredictable actions and gaslighting. The inconsistency of love and care creates a powerful bond, which, even though suppressed by the victim in recovery, keeps pulling the victim back.
Grieving what should have been
This is where patience and self-compassion must be practiced. Our cognitive selves are way ahead of our emotional selves in processing information about our loved ones. The emotional self needs time, support and compassion to come to terms with realities that are in such a stark contrast to what we had believed was real. The emotional self can’t just let go. It must be heard and given time to grieve.
Through therapy and self-education, a victim of family scapegoating gradually develops his or her understanding of what a family should be, how they should have been treated as children and young people, how caring, love and kindness actually look like.
As this understanding grows, so does the resentment, disgust and anger of the scapegoat towards the abusive family members. With a delay, the victim is finally comprehending the harm done to them.
As this understanding grows, the grief expands beyond the time, love and relationships lost. The scapegoat must fully comprehend the hole the family dysfunction created in their lives and the effects it still has on them in the present. This hole is real and lasting. There is no warm encouragement, no concern over the scapegoat’s wellbeing. There is silence, there is talking about the scapegoat behind the scapegoat’s back. Patching up this hole in adulthood is the most difficult aspect of the healing process, the one many of us keep stumbling over and over again (more on this later).
False promises
Occasionally, the hope that prevents the scapegoat from accepting reality receives fuel in the form of occasional communication attempts from members of the scapegoating family systems. Some of these attempts may seem, on the surface level, motivated by an actual interest to reconnect with the scapegoat. Very quickly, however, the scapegoat realizes that the only reason for the communication attempt is to bring the scapegoat back into line. That bringing into line requires the scapegoat to accept the dominant narrative of the scapegoating family. The victim is under pressure to accept that there have never been any problems and that all has been just in the scapegoat’s head. If there were problems, they were the responsibility of the scapegoat, not the scapegoating family system.
This is an impossible situation for the awakened scapegoat, who has begun to speak up against the abusive, toxic and dysfunctional behaviour they had been subject to growing up in the toxic family system.
The toxic family can never look at itself. Instead, it sees the scapegoat’s protestations as evidence of his or her faultiness or difficult nature.
The delusional world of the scapegoating family system
There are no real conversations in the toxic family system. There is either silence or pretending. There is control through overt and covert forms of oppression. There is no interest ever to hear and acknowledge the validity of the scapegoat’s reality. Whatever the scapegoat has to say can’t be real, they must be making it up, they must be crazy, too sensitive. The scapegoating family is perfect and will not entertain any information to the contrary.
Members of the scapegoating family who control the narrative either truly believe the story they spin or are deliberately using manipulation. The mechanism of projective identification is powerful in narcissistic personalities. It serves as a self-protecting mechanism, not allowing the disordered family member to ever face his or her own imperfection, shame and guilt. The guilt and shame need to be projected onto the scapegoat. If the scapegoat protests against the disordered family member’s behaviour, this protestation will be deemed the problem by the disordered family system rather than the behaviour that provoked the protestation.
The narrative about the scapegoat’s faultiness has a firm hold on the family and is accepted by the entire system, even by people who otherwise spent very little time with the scapegoat to be able to form their own opinion.
The behind the back nature of family scapegoating abuse
This firm hold is established by the disordered family member’s need to constantly retell their version of the story. In a toxic family, people don’t talk to each other about problems they have with each other in order to solve those problems. They talk about each other behind each other’s back. This tactic is mostly employed by the controlling family member. Sometimes, the scapegoat attempts to set the record straight but is usually not believed and dismissed.
The toxic story-telling continues even after the scapegoat physically leaves the family system and will intensify if the scapegoat speaks up and seeks support outside the family system. It always has to be someone else, not the family, that is wrong. Either the scapegoat, their therapist or the scapegoat’s friends must be spinning a false narrative.
With this mindset, there is no chance for reconciliation. The scapegoating family is not interested in reconciliation and repair. They are only interested in maintaining their dominance and control over the narrative.
It’s important to note that scapegoating families have patterns of behaviour that lead to the accumulation of skeletons in the family closets. The scapegoating family members are psychologically not strong or evolved enough to process these inconvenient truths and learn from them.
Difficult emotions
Coming to terms with the whole truth about the scapegoating family system is a long journey, full of ups and downs and some very difficult emotions. The more the scapegoat speaks up, the more the system rejects them. The more the system rejects them, the more they hurt. It is their own family, their flesh and blood that over and over is showing to the scapegoat that they mean nothing. The family’s dysfunction is dearer to the system than the scapegoat. There will be anger, there will be rage, there will be resentment.
The scapegoat is asked to achieve some nearly divine level of forgiveness and understanding. They are asked to take full responsibility for themselves and their emotions, their safety in the world and their basic human need for connection. The family will fulfill none of that and the scapegoat must cease being bitter, somehow, eventually.
It’s hard. It’s hard because life is hard and in the scapegoat’s life there is a hole and there is meanness and darkness where there should have been love, support and nurturing. Of course, the scapegoat is bitter. Of course, the scapegoat is resentful. Thanks to all their education and psychotherapy work, they now understand what life should have been, what family connections should have provided, what life should have been like. But accepting fully that none of those needs will be fulfilled by the family and directing all energies towards finding ways how to plug those holes and build a more secure and full existence is the only way forward.
But there are challenges.
What is healing and how can it be achieved?
True healing doesn’t happen when reading books and sitting in a psychotherapist’s office. That’s only the research and study part of the recovery process. The actual healing happens in the real world by the scapegoat creating a different, better, more connected, fuller life experience.
The main hurdles to healing
But that is not easy either. The scapegoat is programmed to be drawn towards dysfunctional people. He or she most likely has co-dependent tendencies and subconsciously tends to connect with people to whom he or she can be useful, whom he or she can rescue. They may also be prone to falling for narcissistic personalities who present as an answer to all the scapegoat’s prayers. The scapegoat is stumbling through the world, learning from one painful, interpersonal experience after another, losing hope, getting more distrustful with every disappointment.
So, is there hope?
It appears to me that the scapegoat needs to accept that their approach to meeting their complex and difficult emotional needs has to be multi-faceted. On one hand, we do need others who can relate to our experience. We need others like us. But on the other hand, connecting with other ‘damaged’ people is a risky business. Triggers flare up, communication skills are not yet developed to repair ruptures and more trauma ensues.
The scapegoat’s survival depends on their ability to keep going. To learn from every failure and approach the next situation with a bit more caution, bit more wisdom, accepting fully that interpersonal relationships are a mine-field, but having faith that with patience and constant work, it can be done.
I have previously written about the tricky business of 12-step fellowships, such as Adult Children of Alcoholic and Dysfunctional Families. But the truth is that one dysfunctional meeting should not put the scapegoat off such support groups forever. They need this type of a connection, but they need to work on other types of connection as well.
The scapegoat also needs to work on their self-esteem and confidence through their professional endeavours, building further networks of connections and carving a space in life for themselves where their family of origin had none for them.
I am not there yet, I still have a long journey ahead of me, but it appears to me that achieving radical acceptance and a full understanding of the family situation as well as the wider context of the problem, is the first solid step in the right direction. There will be no magic bullets, no sudden filling of all the holes and voids through one single person, one single group. A lot is asked from us, and unless we accept that it all has some sort of a higher meaning, it is hard to accept why.
But I do believe that scapegoats do have a sort of special power. They know the society’s dark truth. They are the ones that were silenced, marginalized, erased. They know. They know too much. But they might be able to use it to create change. And since change always must start on a small scale, I would like to hope that a connecting and collective healing of scapegoats could bring something into the world that has been missing to the detriment of everyone.
tereza.pultarova@gmail.com
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