Are You The Family's (or Other Environment's) Scapegoat?

I admit I was not happy with my blog post last week, because I felt rattled when I wrote it – which way do I go from here, what is going to be the most helpful, etc. I started to erase it, but things happened this week that let me know I shouldn’t. Recovering from anything is not a straight line from Point A to Point Z. It looks more like going from Point A to Point B to Point C and then back to Point A for a while before you move on to Point D. I was reminded of this, because I’m trying to help a long-term caregiver find a place to live before she becomes homeless. She was a 24/7/365 caregiver in a very difficult family caregiving situation for over a decade. When the person she was caregiving for passed away, no one in her family showed any appreciation for what she had done. Instead, they are booting her out of the house that was owned by the people she was a caregiver for, so they can sell the house and get the money. They do not care that she is going to be homeless. During the hours of run around I faced this week trying to find help for her, I was reminded that healing from anything rarely happens in a straight line. Sometimes the jagged line it happens in is so scary that the person experiencing it feels rattled like I did when I was writing last week’s blog post. Therefore, sharing a post from time to time that comes from that place of being rattled and afraid will probably be very understood by the people who need the information in this blog.

In previous blog posts, I told you about how I am overcoming being a doormat and the kinds of personalities and behaviors I had to learn to be aware of in other people in order to keep myself safe. What I haven’t told you about yet is why caregiving resources are on the Resource List for this blog. I was a caregiver for well over a decade just like the lady I am helping this week. That is why I help other caregivers as much as I can. I know how hard it can be. I have been a caregiver more than once in my family. In one situation, I was given caregiving responsibilities by the State after the previous caregivers abused my family member. All of that happened due to some of the things I’ve previously covered in this blog. After that, I was the only one who was allowed to take care of him. That was my longest caregiver situation. At the end of it, I almost ended up homeless, too. My financial situation was a little better since I was married and my husband had an income, but I had to ignore my house for so long that I had insurance and repair issues that almost took my house from me. When I should have been grieving and resting, I was running myself near to the grave trying to make everything the way a neighborhood improvement organization and an insurance company wanted them to be. Those two organizations had no compassion for the situation I’d been in as a caregiver. That is why I help other caregivers as much as I am able to – I understand!

When I ended last week’s post about how religion can teach us to be doormats, which makes us vulnerable to dangerous people who come into congregations counting on absolute forgiveness and reconciliation no matter what they do, I planned to write about scapegoating this week. That still seems like an appropriate topic. The person I’m helping has often been the scapegoat of her family, with the vulnerability of being a caregiving making her even more of a target for that type of treatment. I had the same experience. In addition, scapegoating is probably one more thing people who are healing should be aware of as a behavior we should not accept from other people.

I was years into counseling before I learned about being a scapegoat. I was sitting in my counselor’s office shortly after the State gave me caregiving responsibility for the person I just mentioned. I gave the counselor a list of times I was the one who had done everything right, yet I was the person who was getting the blame and being bad-mouthed. I told her that many times I had thought I was crazy and only imagining that I was the one who was making the right decisions. I was not crazy. The State had just made me aware that I was the only one making right enough decisions to be given the care of this family member who had just been abused. Still, I was always the one who was seen as the bad guy inside the circle I grew up in. That is when she made me aware of the concept of scapegoating.

Basically, dysfunctional families and environments will often pick the person who doesn’t fit into their dysfunction and make them the scapegoat. Getting counseling to get healthier is one main thing that can cause a person to become the scapegoat. The scapegoat is usually the person who is doing enough right that they threaten the dysfunction that everyone else wants to embrace, so they have to make you look crazy to protect their dysfunction. If you’ve experienced it, you most likely will recognize it immediately, but it is a very hard thing to explain.

Let me share a story from my life to try to explain it. Several years before I understood that I was the family scapegoat, I watched the Jennifer Lopez movie, “Angel Eyes.” In this movie, Lopez played a character named Sharon. Sharon was isolated from her family as the bad guy, because in her younger years, she had called the police to protect her mother during a moment of dangerous domestic violence. In addition to that, she wouldn’t push her father’s alcoholism under the rug and be codependent to him like the rest of the family was. For this reason, she was ostracized, frequently told how bad she was, frequently told what was wrong with her, the dysfunction of the family was blamed on her, etc. As I watched the movie, I started to cry. I cried through the rest of the movie. I knew that I was Sharon, and I still didn’t understand why things would roll that way in any family.

I remember talking to a friend after it was over and asking her why I was Sharon and why Sharon experienced what she did in the movie when it was so unfair. My friend was a social worker. She gave me some good advice, but she didn’t tell me about scapegoating in dysfunctional families. I didn’t learn that until the State gave me someone in my family who needed a caregiver and let me know why they gave this person to me. Only then did my counselor tell me about being the scapegoat.

I think it is appropriate to share this information about scapegoating before I move on to telling the stories behind the information on the Resource List for this blog. This is another piece of information that would have greatly assisted me in my healing if I would have had the information earlier in my healing journey. My blog posts so far have been about sharing the kinds of things that would have helped me if I would have known them sooner, and scapegoating is one of those issues. So, it is good that I wrote about it before I moved on.

Scapegoating is a very complicated issue, so I am going to share some articles and resources that helped me (shared by counseling professionals, so I have confidence in the articles) before I close this post (and these are also on the Resources List):

SCAPEGOATING

Article to help you understand it better: http://glynissherwood.com/12-steps-to-breaking-free-from-being-the-family-scapegoat/

Angel Eyes Movie Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdW0fXKKlkg IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0225071/ Song That Goes With This Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA7NgP6LSL4

Narcissists Scapegoating: http://glynissherwood.com/the-scapegoats-guide-to-surviving-narcissistic-families/