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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To begin the restorative journey, children who have been subjected to the scapegoat role must learn to stand up to shame and focus on healing their inner world first. Healing stems from a foundation of having a strong sense of identity and self, and building a supportive relationship with oneself.
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.
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.
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.
Like the strong goat Aaron selected, the target of family scapegoating is also often the strongest and healthiest member of the family.
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.
Signs you're the scapegoat of your family:
You feel you have to act out or defend yourself in rebellion (e.g., feeling hurt and angry, or the need to fight or lash out in some way). You look for the truth in your family's dynamics, and they don't want to hear it (e.g., "How dare you question my parenting").
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.
SCAPEGOATS BECOME HEALERS
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.
A narcissist will decide who their scapegoat is based on their own fears, feelings of jealousy, sense of inadequacy and insecurities. From a narcissist's perspective, a scapegoat is someone who somehow triggers their fears, feelings of jealousy, sense of inadequacy and insecurities.
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.
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.
Depending on the situation, a scapegoat can certainly recover and rebuild their life, but it takes time, self-reflection, and often therapy to do so. Someone who has been scapegoated likely experienced deep-seated trauma and hurt, and these feelings can linger for a long time.
Family scapegoats could find themselves in abusive environments for the rest of their lives or even become abusers themselves if they don't address the trauma that their abusive upbringing created. An upbringing in an unhealthy/abusive environment will corrupt the victim's definition of love and healthy relationships.
People make scapegoats when there's some fundamental truth that they don't want to acknowledge. A person or a society can transfer the blame onto them and expel or eliminate them and imagine that the cause of all of their problems is gone. People do it because it produces a sense of catharsis or relief or healing.
As mentioned previously, scapegoating can negatively impact all parties. Whether you're realizing you've engaged in this behavior or you've been on the receiving end of it, you may be feeling guilt, shame, experiencing low self-esteem, or having trouble making sense of the situation.
Expectedly, the scapegoat oftentimes feels very jealous of the golden child. And the golden child is usually so enmeshed with their parent that they can't see anything wrong with the parent-child relationship they're in. They'll jump in to defend their parent and might even think they have the best parent in the world.
Sometimes the golden child can become another narcissist. Indoctrinated into the worldview of the damaged parent, the chosen one absorbs emotional damage alongside the attention. Despite what most scapegoats will tell you, golden children are usually the more severely traumatised in narcissistic families.