The Scapegoated Guide To Healthy Progress

                               YOU DON'T HAVE TO FORGIVE EVERYONE OR ANYONE TO GET HEALTHY

 

Here is the good news, although you don't have to forgive anyone, when you do get healthier of mind and body, once you forgive yourself, you will, as a matter of natural course, feel you have forgiven those who hurt you. 

I just bought a shit ton of notebook journals, I thrashed to and fro trying to decide what sort of journal to start keeping as it will be one and two,  a guide to my own healing and a guide to yours. I need something easy to translate from pen to a word program. Why do I make things so hard ? I shall try to make this as simple to follow for you and myself. I owe us that much. I settled on a set of notebooks , those college bound ones that will easily just be dated and written in and then tossed in a box to transpose later. 

I could just blog post my every thought along with my day and night musings but that would be awful to read. I settled on my old method of journaling , write the date in the top of my notebook, make a few bullet points to note my ideas for the day, then at the end of the day, note what I accomplished. We scapegoats need to see, in black and white, our progress. We need and ever strive for proof. We were turned into the doubting Thomas's in our family and we were ever forced to either go insane or prove what we saw and heard with our eyes and ears. 

I have kept journals for years, they were a reality check for me daily and kept me honest and most of all, feeling competent. 

So , if your a scapegoat by family design, or societies ministrations , you have a few if not all of these experiences or feelings about yourself.

* You were and feel abandoned by the significant person who reared you and the unit you belonged to.

* You most likely were reared by one or two narcissists.

*The golden child in your family and other members of your family often never took your side.

* You were mostly blamed for the problems in your family despite not being the actual catalyst of those problems.

*You were told you were too sensitive, too outspoken and made to feel insane or unreal in your thinking, you were told you were "Crazy" , "Unbalanced", " "A Story teller", "Mentally Ill", "A Liar", "An Exaggerator", " A Tattler" , and or, "Untrustworthy". 

*Your parent who created your role as scapegoat sold you out to cover their shortcomings, therefore , by the definition of love, they did not love you but more than likely , did not hate you by hate's definition either,   but did in fact , and with detrimental outcomes ,  treated  you as expendable. 

* You were and tend to be The Whistleblower in your life as you were in your childhood. A WHistlblower tends to feel injustice on deep levels and feels to the need to expose falsehoods and by definition, people fear Whistle-blowers who might reveal their own issues, so you are ever caught in the unending cycle of demanding what is what is acknowledged and being ostracized for telling your observations and your perception of truth.

* You have feelings of self loathing and do not feel,  on deep levels , you deserve to be happy.

*You tend , more than most folks, to feel like a fraud, unauthentic and not competent.

*Your parent or child rearer sold you out  by discrediting your story or truths to outside parties, extended relatives, school personnel, doctors, neighbors and anyone who might be a support system to you. 

 * In order to get a crumb of affection you had to compromise your sense of reality

*By compromising your sense of reality to get affection you felt more self loathing

*You often felt the need to fix things in other people's lives and in relationships

* You tended to detach from people whom you might have had deep complex relationships for fear they would abandon you. They could not be that important or you would suffer when they abandoned you.

*You tended to go to extremes to feel good, ie, I call The sex, drugs and rock and roll syndrome

 * You tend to superficially forgive to fit in with a community, relationship or family.

* Due to chronic abuse and gas lighting, you develop or developed a host of anxiety disorders.

* You,  more than most, have been diagnosed with ADHD, OCD and borderline personality disorders and probably have had brief bouts with paranoia , delusional thinking and chronic thoughts of suicide 

* Undermined, Your accomplishments were rarely noted and or were downgraded and diminished. 

I understand this is a painful list. I do. You might meet almost every criteria from my list and know I have spent over twenty years in therapy due to the above. The good news is there is help and immediate help. 

One has to move beyond the "Story" of their role as scapegoat to heal. When we hear heal,  a lot of people think you can meditate yourself out of the above ingrained harms done to you. Meditation will help alleviate anxiety it will not solve the problems you feel and react to. It is a tool to calm and quell your reactions , how you feel or bury how you feel ,  is  the problem , not your reactions to how you feel. Medications will address your reactions not your feelings and injuries to self.

How on earth do you fix the big god damned mess? We scapegoats are all about fixing . It is why so many battered woman stay in relationships, well one simple reason , there are very complex reasons they stay but I guarantee you, she was a scapegoat in her family . 

Here is how to fix the  mess:

*1) You do not have to forgive anyone for any wrong done to you. Take that off your to do list. You cannot , cannot put the cart before the wheel.   I know that sounds counter intuitive, especially with religious folks who tell you one must  turn the other cheek or bury the hatchet, or forgive and forget, or that old promise you will help you more by forgiving he/she or them.  I promise you , if you do not heal your inner child whose goals and rights to the pursuit of happiness were vacated by your narcissistic parent, you will never be in a position to forgive them or anyone, let alone yourself. You will only enable more abuse and  ignorance. Forgiveness might happen,  but much later into your healing process.

*2) Stop expecting those who scapegoated you to apologize in any meaningful way. Narcissist dont apologize in meaningful ways. In order to forgive a person or event or oneself, one must get the three R's from your abuser or community. Repentance (a show of sincere regret or remorse) Restitution (to the best of their ability return what was taken such as my sense of safety, lack of justice, etc) and Renewal ( a change in behavior - to live a new life that does not include abusing, blaming, scapegoating, me or anyone else). 

3.) Distance yourself from he/she or those who abused you. 

Society frowns on those who cast out family. What is wrong with you is more often the focused notation than what went wrong to force you to make such an enormous decision. It might be possible to keep these relationships but you really need to look hard at the payout to you personally , if there is any, other than , fitting in.  You will be openly vulnerable to the pivot point the scapegoat inflicters put on you and the point is: How can all of them get along and not you with them, the  "problem child". You will stick out like a sour thumb if you drop them from your life. You will have to weigh these consequences for yourself and your comfort level. At the very least you have to set rigid boundaries with family who either went along with the scapegoating or initiated it to keep themselves from filling your shoes. No one wants to be the scapegoat. No one. If you exit stage left, you will still be the scapegoat in their mind,  but your absence will force the role on whomever is left behind. Expect retaliation for abandoning them and saving yourself. 

4. Examine how your role as scapegoat has harmed your life. Make lists, lots of lists. It is excruciating to reexamine your losses , lists are a little less cruel to contend with, but painful none the less. For example ,
1. Did not go after my dream to become ___________________________.

2. Blew up relationships after people proved disloyal or uncommitted to me.

3.Abused drugs and alcohol and sought out provocative sexual encounters to compensate  or feel something. 

4. Hyper focused on everyone else's problems instead of dealing with those of my own making. 

5.  Although one of the worst residual effect of being a scapegoat is your obsessive need to prove what you say, you do need to see in black and white, what happened to you. You need to view  the consequences you experienced at the hand(s) of the narcissist parent or community. 

5. You need to reclaim your ideal self. My daughter made some interesting observations and gave me some ideas on this process as she comes to terms with being raised by a person with all the baggage I came with. Here is one tool and a few more .

1.) Imagine your most vulnerable self, age 5 to 10, your most formative years and when you felt the most trauma. Imagine  she is sitting beside you in your auto , she is in the passenger seat and you are in the driver seat. Now imagine she is traumatized, she looks to you for comfort, help and direction. What do you do? What does she need you to do? What did you need someone to do for you at that point in your past? Now, as the adult you are, do for the child who sits beside you what she needs to feel comforted, validated and safe. You are now parenting in healthy ways,  yourself , you are healing that child by rewriting your story, not in the past but in the moment. When you are triggered try that method.

2.) You need imagery of strength and support if you dont actually have a support system that works. When I made some major breakthroughs over the years, in therapy,  I had this recurring dream and each time the dream  revealed what I needed to deal with. One's psyche will not make you deal with anything your not ready to tackle.
I was walking down a set of stairs to a basement  in a very scary house. As I timidly took steps down the stairs I noticed there were cobwebs and dark corners, shadows everywhere and I was very apprehensive and almost , but not quite, bubbling with fear.  In front of me was a Golden Retriever on a harness, it was leading me to the dark corners and I realized I had the leash, I had the control of the dog. The dog was leading me and I was blind but yet I could see. I did not want to see,  but I could. I knew as a counselor of trauma victims this was a very significant dream. It had layers and layers of meaning. When we are tackling very emotional soul crushing events and feelings we need strong imagery of our ability to be not so much in control but have the support to survive our tribulations. Find some image that means comfort, support, honesty, loyalty and strength, some image that accompanies you through this life and the past. One cannot purge the past until one faces it head on. 

3.) I use sticking notes:  I tend to be impulsive while being very hyper focused, that is a very dangerous formula of self destruction when I am triggered by that horrible list of shit that I made for us, you an me. So, to curb my impulses and lower the volume on my focus, I write sticky notes to remind myself of my worst impulses. I write things like,  STOP, WAIT, NO, NOT NOW, WHY DO YOU NEED TO DO THAT NOW?  CAN THIS WAIT? PAUSE.

4. Storytelling: Telling "stories" was the accusation used against you to discredit your stories and truths. So turn the tables. Write your story, keep a journal or a blog or notebooks, but write what happened to you. Write it in detail, make sure to include how you felt with every event. We scapgoatees tend to detach from our emotions , it hurts to trust people who label you untrustworthy when in reality and fact, it was they being untrustworthy with your relevancy and they did not consider your feelings most of all. 

5. After you write you story, write your I Wish Story.  I suspect your hopes and dreams were shattered constantly and with Machiavellian ruthlessness. It is important to rewrite your story as  if the events and traumas had not happened to you. If all had gone well what might your story have been? What were the outcomes if you did not fit that terrible list I wrote and you related to? What traits did your I wish parents have? This story might be more heartbreaking than the real story of what happened to you, know you will use it to write one last story , one that heals you. Every good thing you do for yourself is a healing , every thing. Little or big. Upt to this second you have done enormous personal therapy work on yourself. You must pat yourself on the back often . You must.  Rarely did you get validated and you might display traits that make people not offer you those pats, so do it for yourself.

6. Now write your story based on who you are right now, right this minute in time. You  might need a break for a while to get to this, in time you will find the courage to do the last story . Here is the even better  news, your last story is not going to end, it will go on every day as you toss off the armor of your defensiveness, as it , almost miraculously melts from your countenance. Your stress will be less and less, you will not work so hard to prove to the world that you are worthy, you will know you are worthy. As all beings are. You dont have to constantly prove your worth or your words , your deeds will be seen. As you get healthier certain people will not enjoy your company, I suspect by now you have an entourage of blamers in your life, people who reinforce your role as scapegoat. They may appear as naysayers every thwarting your confidence to strive for something other than settling for less. They may be audience members in your life who want you to entertain them and make them laugh, a lot of scapegoated children who reach adulthood entertain and diminish themselves to hide the pain and keep some level of support with friends. Some of those friends either left you in the dust a long time ago or you ditched them. Some are still willing to see beneath the vaneer of your comedy routine. Some may not have those depths. One way or another, as you get healthy you  will not draw bad unhealthy friends who take all the glory or monopolize your time fixing them. They will fall away. 

When you get to the story of now, the here and now, dont forget to look at the other two stories. Take the fantasy , if only story and try to weave yourself into the fabric of now. What did you forfeit that was important to you in the past? Is there a way to reclaim what you lost? For example, I gave up art. I was told it was no way to earn a living and I should be a secretary. I guess my narcissistic parent who was a secretary , and who chose a safe comfortable job did not want me to realize my dream of being an artist. She went so far to refuse to sign financial aid paperwork to thwart me. It worked  then. I paint now. I started painting again three years ago. I dabbled over the years but it was such a painful experience I abandoned my gift for art . How dare I let my narcissistic mother win? My new story has me as an artist, writer, human rights activist, grandmother, shower singer, I used to sing and I was good, but after destroying my vocal cords with excessive smoking I rasp out songs. I sound good in the shower. I might yet join a choir or chorus. The door is ever open to my dreams now. Find a way to recapture your dreams that were thwarted by unconscious people who only had their interests at heart. 

7. Now live your story, It is the only way to reclaim what you were put on the earth to do, be you.  My oncologist told me , when I was so worried about dying from cancer. "None of us are getting out of this alive." Go live you life. That phrase keeps me on my toes and motivates me to do just that. Live my life. You are not a pariah, you are not the culmination of your families lost opportunities , you are not an orphan or a nomad sent to the desert to roam with no roots. Your family does not have to be people who you were born to, but people who you find and who find you along the way. The healthier you get the healthier the company you keep.  There is a bible passage that says this, I paraphrase. " You were circled on the map here , it was written long ago, and the lord bowed at every place on the map , he put a circle around you and bowed at where you are. "  I interpret that  to mean a little different than the christian martyrs did. I think the lord knew we would face tribulations , the human condition is so turbulent. I would add, that although you might be going down into the basement , looking in dark corners , finding the monsters who taunted your path, you do not have to stay in that spot too long, you get to put a foot in front of the other and move on to greener pastures. Perhaps we need to bow at our paths and roads taken but we also need to acknowledge , as adults at least, we get to choose with the best emotional and scientific data, what road might be fraught with danger or more interesting a choice. 

8. You survived. If you did not end your life , you survived and you want to survive. So do that, survive and learn and grow and forgive yourself for being thwarted by people who just felt their survival was more important than yours. It was , in the beginning , never your fault.