The practice of Scapegoating is a way of projecting family issues onto one family member. Usually, the family scapegoat’s a particular child. The reason for choosing the child is complicated. Perhaps the child is weaker and more vulnerable, or perhaps the child reminds one parent of the pain inflicted by the other parent and subsequently uses the child to deflect their own pain.
Scapegoats can be moving targets. The identified scapegoat can change over time within the same family. For example, a golden child, or favorite, who becomes noncompliant can then become devalued and replaced. The ex-golden child then becomes the new scapegoat. According to Leanne Chapman, psychologist and certified therapist, you may be shouldering the scapegoat role if you:
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Are made responsible for family issues, disagreements and conflicts, even when these occur as a result of other people’s actions.
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Other family members have been verbally, emotionally or physically abusive towards you.
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Are disbelieved and called a liar if you try to defend yourself and explain what really happened.
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People outside the family system go along with the bullying or look the other way when you ask for help.
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Are expected to help other family members out but cannot expect the same help in return.
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Find yourself asking ‘what did I do now?’ on a regular basis
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Notice that the person accusing you of bad behavior is the one actually engaging in this behavior, ex: accuses you of being rude while they are repeatedly rude to you.
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Your achievements are minimized or turned into something negative, ex: you mention you got a good grade on your last assignment and you’re told “you think you’re better than us.”
Family systems are complicated. When parents do not create healthy family dynamics by supporting each other and creating safety within the home, the children tend to bear the brunt. As the family system changes–moving out, divorce, death, etc, so do the moving parts. With the shifts in family dynamics come the unpredictability of who fills the role of scapegoat, who becomes the golden child, and who becomes the mascot (the person who distracts the family pain with humor).
As children launch from the home into adult life, new scapegoats become necessary to keep the family dynamics at a “toxic equilibrium.” Peg Streep, author of Daughter Detox: Recovering from An Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life, speaks on the nature of “the rotating scapegoat role” saying, the practice of always having a designated scapegoat “can become institutionalized in a family with a controlling mother… When things don’t go as planned or as she imagined them taking place, she both needs a reason for what she considers a disaster and a person to blame it on, other than herself.”
Dr. Murray Bowen M.D., an American Psychiatrist, dedicated his life to the helping the human cause and produced a remarkable new theory of Family Systems. According to Dr. Bowen, the family is an emotional unit and any change in the function of one of the members is automatically compensated for by changes in the emotional functioning of the other members. He speaks to the concept of interconnectivity, the way people react to and affect one another.
When studying individual psychopathology, it is important to understand the domino effect of one individual upon another. By recognizing that there is an entire “system gone wrong,” the pressure can be taken off of the identified patient and redirected back onto the cause (more about the cause from a mind map perspective).
From a Mind Map Perspective
From a mind map perspective, it is important to dismantle the family dysfunction at the cause. Ideally, parents would psychoeducate so they could dismantle their own psychopathology and create healthy family systems for their children. We can identify the cause of systems gone wrong by identifying the inception of the system starting with the mother-child and father-child bonds.
When we as infants do not receive the necessary emotional ingredients for a healthy mind, we are more prone to breaking down emotionally and even physically. According to attachment theorist Dr. John Bowlby, children need attunement and mirroring in the form of stay-at-home mothering and parents who create an environment of putting the child’s needs first. When this does not occur, it creates a foundation for toxic pairing (toxic choices of partners) and the creation of toxic families that then create unhealthy systems.
When the family is dysfunctional, the children become triangulated into the dysfunction and creations such as scapegoating become emotional release valves for the dysfunctional family. These systems then get passed down multi-generationally
