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.
Scapegoating causes high levels of anxiety as the target never feels safe emotionally in the family, and can lead to depression, anxiety or post traumatic stress. Damage to self worth can cause relationship and vocational problems as well.
Scapegoats can suffer a variety of negative consequences including loss of social status, economic problems, social isolation, and depression. People are more likely to engage in scapegoating when they are stressed, experiencing oppression, or afraid.
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.
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.
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.
Like the strong goat Aaron selected, the target of family scapegoating is also often the strongest and healthiest member of the family.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Signs you're the scapegoat of your family:
You feel (and are treated like) the black sheep of your family (e.g., "I didn't raise you to act like this"). 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).
The golden child is often the one who becomes a narcissist, thus continuing the intergenerational cycle of abuse. Meanwhile, the scapegoat usually has enough left in them to break the cycle. Also, the enmeshment between the narcissistic parent and the golden child can last forever (or at least a really long time).
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.
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.
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.
Scapegoats are often naturally sensitive and may have low self-esteem—traits that keep them stuck in the scapegoat role. If you feel like you are an easy target in your social circle, you must abandon this role in order to enjoy greater emotional health. Start by addressing any guilt you feel.
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.
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.
This is because when a narcissist is able to destroy the self-esteem of their scapegoat, it allows them to figuratively point their finger at them and think to themselves, “I'm not the unlovable, unwanted, inadequate, worthless, and weak one, they are.”
Being vulnerable
More often than not, the scapegoat is the person perceived to be the most vulnerable in the family or group. Now, this has nothing to do with physical strength. This is all about mental and emotional duress.
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.