The “plebs” might resent them, but a scapegoat is a victim that can be safely attacked.
A family scapegoat is a person who takes on the role of 'black sheep' or 'problem child' in their family and gets shamed, blamed, and criticized for things that go wrong within the family unit, even when these things are entirely outside of their control.
It's also important to remember that these scapegoated family members often have their own families that are warm, loving and successful. The bottom line is that making someone the scapegoat is abuse, whether that person is a child or adult.
Potential Consequences Of Scapegoating
Scapegoating is a destructive behavior that can have long-term psychological effects on both parties involved. In the target of this behavior, feelings of worthlessness, guilt, isolation, and even conditions like depression and/or anxiety can arise.
Healing from shame requires a high level of awareness when the Inner Scapegoat has been activated – challenging negative and self-punitive beliefs, and truthfully reframing victimizing experiences. Scapegoats must consistently stand up to the idea that they are bad or unlovable. This will likely take a lot of practice.
Effects of Being a Scapegoat
Trauma: Being deprived of a family's love, singled out as the “bad one” in the household, and having one's positive attributes overlooked can set up a child for a lifetime of emotional and psychological distress, where they struggle believing they are good, worthy, competent, or likable.
That's one of the reasons scapegoats are created: they make an easy target for pent-up frustration and pain. They also distract people in the group from real problems. Scapegoats play an important and positive role.
Like the strong goat Aaron selected, the target of family scapegoating is also often the strongest and healthiest member of the family.
Everything that goes well becomes associated with the golden child's goodness, while everything that goes wrong is blamed on the scapegoat. The golden child recognizes the inequity of this, and feelings of guilt for the treatment of their siblings may be carried into adulthood.
Scapegoating is defined by dictionary.com as “the act or practice of assigning blame or failure to another, as to deflect attention or responsibility away from oneself.” Cheating individuals often use scapegoating as a form of Gaslighting, scooping blame onto their partner in order to justify their extracurricular ...
When a scapegoat leaves their family of origin they are going to experience a lot of invalidation, devaluation, dehumanization, and chaos that is designed to manipulate them back into the abuse cycle and remain a repository for the family's negative emotions.
They do this by seeing themselves as the healer and fixer of you. It is at this point that the scapegoat becomes the identified patient in the social group. They use the idea of themselves as a good person for focusing on helping and fixing you to further avoid their own pain.
Of the child roles in the narcissistic family, the entitled and enmeshed golden child is probably most likely to develop a narcissistic personality. However, being scapegoated can also lead to narcissism, particularly the covert form.
You Are Portrayed In A Negative Light To Others
If you're the family scapegoat, your character may be publicly attacked at every opportunity. Your family may want to convince others that you are not worthy of respect, so they don't have to own up to their part of the family's dysfunction.
Research shows that scapegoating allows a parent to think of the family as healthier than it is. Scapegoating lets a parent minimize responsibility for and explain negative outcomes, enhancing a sense of control.
As a consequence of having their family relational distress and abuse symptoms go unrecognized, many adult survivors of FSA suffer from anxiety, panic attacks, depression, unrecognized grief, and anger management issues.
Scapegoats often have trouble feeling safe in relationships – especially intimate relationships – due to the massive betrayal of trust in their family. They can also have challenges managing emotions, and find they either feel overwhelmed and anxious, or shut down and not know how they are feeling.
For Girard, scapegoats are always innocent of the specific charges laid against them; the accusations are always false; scapegoating is always a heinous act of injustice.
For individuals, scapegoating is a psychological defense mechanism of denial through projecting responsibility and blame on others. [2] It allows the perpetrator to eliminate negative feelings about him or herself and provides a sense of gratification.
Quite often the scapegoat is the empath or highly sensitive person who has the strength & ability to vulnerably express an authentic hunger for change. This is often the most unwelcomed temperament in a toxic system, familial or other.
Since the golden child has been trained to be an actor, they fail to embrace an authentic relationship with their sibling, scapegoat. There will always be sibling rivalry, which not only have they instigated but they appreciate it since it causes the separation.
In early Roman law an innocent person was allowed to take upon himself the penalty of another who had confessed his own guilt. Christianity reflects this notion in its doctrine of justification and in its belief that Jesus Christ was the God-man who died to atone for the sins of all mankind.
When they grow up, scapegoated children may experience the following: Difficulty expressing their needs: From a young age, the scapegoat child learned to hold things inside. Anything they said could and would often be used against them.
They manipulate others to support their distorted version of reality. All the while, they enjoy the feeling of power they get from making the scapegoat suffer. The narcissist is driven by envy, jealousy and a lack of empathy. They need to be seen as perfect and godlike no matter what it takes.