Many times, healing the scapegoat role on a personal level is about deep healing of trauma, empowerment, and a place to process emotion and find safety in relationship. Healing the scapegoat role in community means learning how to forge new relationships of repair and effective emotional communication.
Most often, scapegoating is done by parents who are projecting their issues onto someone else. Someone seeking to heal from FSA can look into both talk therapy and medication. Other options include Inner Family Systems Therapy or working with a counselor specifically trained in Childhood Trauma Therapy.
The Scapegoat Will Experience a Ton of Confusing Emotions
Once the abuser realizes that they no longer have power and control over the scapegoat who left, they are going to search for a new scapegoat to regulate their suppressed negative emotions and fulfill their insecure need for power and control.
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.
When the scapegoat fights back. It may take some time for the scapegoat child or adult to realize that they were humiliated for no reason. But once they do so, they need to fight back. The scapegoat sons and daughters of narcissistic parents must learn to re-parent themselves.
Many times, healing the scapegoat role on a personal level is about deep healing of trauma, empowerment, and a place to process emotion and find safety in relationship. Healing the scapegoat role in community means learning how to forge new relationships of repair and effective emotional communication.
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.
A scapegoated child may feel isolated to the point that they do not know how to bring attention to the pain they are feeling. In these cases, self-harm or self-sabotaging behaviors could help to draw attention to their suffering.
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.
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.
Scapegoats, since they have been there, often help others to become aware of narcissistic abuse within a dysfunctional family structure and help others to recover. Scapegoats typically are empathic and can empathize with others easily.
Studies have shown that the scapegoat does better in life than the “golden child”. Because they have had to fend for themselves most of their life, and haven't been spoiled like the golden child has. The scapegoat is forced to be more independent, and think for themselves, and be stronger.
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.
As adults, scapegoated children may find themselves paralyzed with fear when they consider dissenting in work environments or with their partners. Disagreeing with someone brings oneself into the forefront. The act delineates the self in stark relief.
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.
One significant comparison between narcissists and scapegoats is that people identified with narcissistic traits show lack of empathy, whereas people with scapegoat traits are empathic.
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.
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.
The family scapegoat may bear the brunt of the family's pent-up frustration. You might feel singled out and made into the butt of every joke. It may not take long for outsiders or other relatives to follow your family's behavior because they may not be aware of what is happening.
Key points. Scapegoating is a common form of parental verbal abuse. 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.
Although narcissists act superior, entitled and boastful, underneath their larger-than-life facade lies their greatest fear: That they are ordinary. For narcissists, attention is like oxygen. Narcissists believe only special people get attention.
Their increased perceptiveness hurts others' feelings. The scapegoat child's role requires them to sacrifice their own growth to remain less than the narcissistic parent. The child has to collude with the parent's claim that the problem in their relationship is the child's growth.
Scapegoats are chosen because some part of their identity reminds the narcissist of all the painful thoughts, feelings, and emotions that they have suppressed within themselves. So, when a narcissist attacks their scapegoat, what they are really doing is attacking the parts of themselves that they find unacceptable.
The question that scapegoats face is what they can do to deal with the problem? While one would might think this should not be a problem for an adult, the fact is that these people become depressed, anxious, withdrawn and even, in the worst cases, suicidal.