TRANSCRIPT
Someone asked in a comment here if I could make a video on being scapegoated after we have broken from our family of origin. I thought that’s a really worthwhile topic. I’ve talked about it in different ways in some different videos. I believe in my book, also, I’m breaking from your parents. I believe I talked about it there, but I’d like to address it most directly here.
Scapegoating. Well, the first thing I’d like to say is scapegoating is an awful thing. Scapegoating is being blamed for things that are not your fault, especially in one’s family of origin. And it’s very, very common. It’s very, very common, especially to blame the person who’s pulling out of the family system in a way. The person who breaks out of the family system, or who starts to break out of the family system, or who hints that they want to break out of the family system, is a renegade. That person is dangerous to the family system. That person threatens the integrity, the sick integrity, of the entire family system.
The reason people want to break away from their family system, I’ve seen this again and again, seen it in my own life also, is because the family system is very sick. The family system can also often be very, very much in denial of how sick it is. And when someone starts to tell the truth, someone starts to break out of the system, someone hints that they don’t like this family system at all, that starts bringing all that denial, all that pain, all that ugliness, all that sickness up to the surface. And that’s incredibly threatening for a family system. It’s threatening to its stability.
So a big part of often what that family system does is they take all of the blame that really belongs on the family system and they put it on the person who’s trying to get out. So what they do is they say the person who’s breaking out, “You’re the unhealthy one. You’re the sick one. We’re fine. We’re good. We’re healthy. We’re normal, and you’re not. You’re the problem. You’re crazy. You’re sick.” Sometimes it gets really extreme. Sometimes literally they can get the person who’s breaking out of the family system to be labeled as mentally ill to some degree. It happened in my own family. They started labeling me as mentally ill even though at that time I was working as a psychotherapist. I was actually very, very healthy in my life, and that didn’t matter at all because the fact that I was breaking out to them showed that I was different. I was not normal, their definition of normal and healthy and sane was the family system.
If you look like the family system, if you behave like the family system, if you are the family system, if you laud the family system, you’re okay. And if you do anything other than that, you are a problem. And in a way, that’s how arbitrary our world is. That’s how arbitrary our mental health system even can be. Healthiness is considered being normal. Unhealthiness is not being normal. So if you’re doing things that are different from normal, the norms being the fundamental parts of the family system, you can be considered sick and crazy.
It’s like breaking out of the family system gives the world—and what is the world for a child? The primary world of the child is the family system. It gives the world, it gives the family system that perfect target to blame you, to put all its pathology onto you.
Now, it’s not so simple as that, though, because I could make it sound like what I’ve said, “Oh, just because you’re breaking out of the family system, you are the healthy one.” And when they call you crazy, they call you this, they’re totally wrong. Well, what I learned for myself, and I’ve seen it with other people, is when I first started breaking out of my family system, I still had a lot of problems. I still was very much like my family system in a lot of ways. I was healthier than them. There was a part of my consciousness that was more healthy than they were, which is why I wanted to get away from them. I wanted to go more toward health, toward truth. But I still had a lot of problems.
And so my family, they started blaming me sometimes for the things that were my problems, especially when I was younger, and some of my problems were more obvious. The other thing in my family, I think it’s true in a lot of family systems that I have seen, is they protect their family secrets of the people who are part of the family system. They don’t snitch on the people in the family system. But when you get out of the family system, suddenly the family system says, “We don’t have to protect your family’s secrets anymore.” Suddenly, it’s like they were blaming me for all problems that I had had in my life. They’re talking about it with each other, spreading a lot of gossip. But really, a lot of it was still scapegoating—a lot of their pain, a lot of their frustration that they couldn’t control me anymore, and using some of my own weaknesses against me. Whereas if I’d stayed in the family system, they never would have said any of those things.
So for me, what it did is it made me realize, “Daniel, I have to become healthier.” In a way, it really propelled me forward because not everything that they were saying about me in terms of my unhealthiness, not everything that they were doing to try to scapegoat me was completely wrong. It’s like I really had to grow up a lot, and that’s a big part of how I have managed to survive outside of the family system. And I’ve seen this with a lot of people. If you start breaking out of the family system, actually, you really have to work five times harder to become healthier. You have to build a new environment for yourself, a new social world for yourself.
And for me also, and I’ve seen this with others, I had to work hard to build a whole new relationship with myself to really become strong, to become rooted in the ground. I couldn’t plug into the so-called love of my family anymore because they wouldn’t give it. I had to plug into loving myself—something very new and scary. That’s how I got much stronger, such that when they were putting things on me and trying to scapegoat me, it was like, “Ah, I don’t have to accept this. It doesn’t affect me as much anymore.”
This brings me to what I think will be my final point when I talk about scapegoating because it’s something that I realized over time. It started to ring a bell in my mind about the subject of scapegoating from my family system in specific, but also about scapegoating in general. That when people scapegoated me, they were letting me know that they were not my friends. They were not my allies. They were my enemies. To scapegoat someone is a hostile thing. It is the act of an enemy.
So when I started to figure out, “Ah, this is what’s going on. These people are scapegoating me,” what I realized is they were showing me that they were not my friends. They were actually showing me that I was making the right decision in getting away from them. And there was one other part of this. When they scapegoated me, it rang a little bell inside my head that was even quieter but went much deeper into me. And what I realized is when they were scapegoating me—by the way, part of what they were doing in scapegoating me was trying to pull me back into their system. It was kind of a threat, like, “We’re going to try to ruin your life. We’re going to try to ruin you psychologically. We’re going to try to ruin your reputation.” And the threat is, “We’re going to continue doing this until you come back to us, or unless you come back to us, and then we won’t do it anymore.” When I figured that out, it was like it rang a little bell inside of me that realized actually they’d always done that to me. My parents, my family system had always been scapegoating me from the time I was a very little boy. And that scapegoating they’d done of me back when I was one, two, three years old for having feelings that they didn’t like, their pathologizing of me, that was their way to control me, to control my behavior.
To make me conform, to make me be like them, to make me split off from whole parts of myself. And that’s how I became like my family system. That’s how I became embedded in the family system. That’s how I actually drank up their bad qualities and really became someone who lost the real true me in a lot of different ways.
And when I started breaking away as a young adult, into my adulthood, certainly as time went on into my 20s, certainly into my 30s, when I figured this out, it was like, ah, their scapegoating of me when I was older really reflected what I’d always gone through. And actually then it was like, ah, in a strange way, their scapegoating of me was very, very helpful because it really helped me connect to the pain and horror and trauma that I’d always gone through in relation to them.
So in a way, it was a very helpful clue to know about the early environment in which I was raised. And it helped me have a lot more empathy for myself, and it helped me create a pattern to learn not just how to love myself as an adult, but how to love that wounded child that was still living in me all of that time.