Patrick Teahan

Helping the inner child heal from being the family scapegoat.

Week of 7/31/23 Journal Prompts

This video on scapegoating is relevant to this week’s prompts.

I often say everyone had time in the doghouse in my family system. Someone was always the bad guy; therefore, our scapegoat role was fluid. 
 
Some of us come from households where it was consistently one person, usually a child, who was in the role of the scapegoat or family therapy or systems theory. This identified patient is the reason on paper why the family is in therapy. A good family therapist knows the troubled teen is simply a sign of much more significant issues the teen is usually positively responding to. 
 
And perhaps the biggest wound the family scapegoat must wrestle with is the betrayal of being used to hide bigger things. 
 
The function of the scapegoat is a distraction from toxicity and parental failings. The scapegoat being ganged up by siblings or stepparents or actual parents or extended family was most like a cover-up in hiding any of the following factors:

• parental substance abuse
• parental cluster b personality disorder
• immature parent
• undiagnosed mental illness in a parent
• parental codependency and or marriage misery
• parental vicarious living, such as with a golden child
• parental untreated trauma 
   
  The central theme in a toxic family around the scapegoat is drama and needing a lousy guy that covers up the parental dysfunction and distracts. 
   
  Being the family scapegoat is genuinely horrific for a child. We’re so used to the term that I think it’s lost it’s impact on its meaning. If you identify as a family scapegoat or shamed child, any of these toxic parental tones will seem familiar to you. 
   
  .A: Well, if I hadn’t had to do your parent-teacher conference, your sister wouldn’t have gotten into trouble.
  .B: blamed for things outside your control, not relevant to cause and effect, and made to feel like a burden for normal parental tasks
  .A: You’re why we have a flat time because YOU wanted to go for pizza on your birthday. 
  .B: blamed for things outside your control, not relevant to cause and effect, and made to feel like a burden for normal parental tasks
  .A: I bet you left the lights on and weren’t home.
  .B: blamed and gaslit
  .A: You’re right now; you should be able to handle a bully.
  .B: blamed for appropriate feelings and shamed for not being able to manage something beyond your development
  .A: I can’t believe I left work to take you to the hospital.
  .B: gaslit and blamed to be made to feel like a burden for normal parental tasks 
   
  All of that involves intense blame that becomes the child’s conditioning. Notice how there is a lot of magical thinking on behalf of the parent, which gaslights the child into buying into the magical thinking.

A child growing up in this blame and gaslighting will start to look for connections between their actions and catastrophe that has consequences on others and eventually them. 
 
When that child grows into adulthood, they can choose between taking on that meaning-making and blaming what they can rebel against.  
 
In the following diagram, we can see these two strategies (rebel or comply) as stuck places that the adult was set up for by the toxic family. The commonalities are shame, abandonment, not being seen, predicting outcomes too much, and projections.