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The sad thing is is that there is also a city councillor in the UK that has also been accused of doing this.

I admit I have been on somewhat of a doom spiral trying to process all the information coming out of the Epstein files recently, and I also agree that the shame has to change sides. So brave of her for doing this.

Wow...all great news SO. Asking for what you need is a way to be seen and, the difficult part for me, is to not take it back for fear of repercussion. It sounds like you arenot self abandoning, but self affirming in uncomfortable situations and seeing who shows up for you and supports you when you do that 

[trauma adaptation]

What that looks like in real life:
- you don't just observe another's pain, but you become flooded by it
- you lose track of your own needs
- your nervous system reacts as if the pain were your own
=> This isn't kindness gone wrong.
It's a trauma adaptation.

TBB, to me this is fawning, a trauma adaptation.

Ingrid Clayton just wrote a very good book regarding fawning that I think touches on a lot of the things you're saying here.

NK, I wonder if you are pulled into the dysfunctional relational dynamics between your f and m and are perhaps their scapegoat in a way for the problems?
 

I very much like the idea of facing the inner voice and being curious about it´s purposes and also asking where it thinks I should be and what I should do.

Hey Dalloway,

I just want to clarify my statement about connecting to the inner voice and dialoging with it. As you mentioned above, the Inner Critic will probably drive you to do things that make it feel better, which is what helped keep you safe as a child, but it's more of child consciousness rather than adult consciousness. It might be good to ask it rather why it wants you to do those things and what it's hoping to achieve by doing that.

I'm realizing that I didn't complete my post and the book is Freedom From Your Inner Critic: A Self Therapy Approach by Jay Earley. It's a good place to start as he maps out how to work with parts like the inner critic if you're interested.

Sending you support,
dolly

Hi Dalloway,

I think your first impulse that it is the Inner Critic is probably along the right track, but it's whatever resonates for you. In his book on IFS and the Inner Critic, sometimes the inner critic is the voice of a parent/caregiver that we identify with (for surivival reasons), which sounds like what you could be doing. IFS can be helpful in starting to map these things out because you can go inside and ask it directly. This is helping you establish a working relationship with your internal parts, and less on needing someone else to confirm or deny what's going on. No shame or judgement, just that it's helpful to build that sense of agency for yourself.

Sending you support,
dolly

As I have been diving more into the workings of growing up as a narcissistically abused child who was scapegoated and how this actually functions internally, I came across a good video on differentiation and the ability to hold space for others ideas for example. As a child growing up in a NPD household (with people on the unNPD spectrum of different guises), there was no allowed differentiation for it meant them having to tolerate others ideas and not being the "same." I think this shows up for me in the way that I also approach relationships to a degree as there was no healthy model for differentiation. It was either conform and survive, or don't and face annihilation (the experience from a preverbal age).

This is about love relationships specifically, but might also be considered more general as well.

Differentiation 101: How To Stay In Love Without Losing Yourself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1irb8xZXKlE

Hope, I hope you enjoy your digital vacation.

Thank you both for talking about Mother Hunger. As NK mentioned, it's funny how the synchronicity seems to happen. I had been looking for books to help with reparenting, and wasn't sure where to start. So, that might be a good place.

Sending you support,
dolly

The discussion about whether the scapegoat is weak or strong is interesting. I'm not even sure if a FOO would view it in those terms, were they to analyse it. After all, most of the time it is in their interests for the scapegoat to continue to be the scapegoat.

This is interesting NK and I do think in my family there were very much ideas around weak and strong --what is to be done and not done. I think scapegoats have to absorb the family story where to not be identified as weak, they have to be "strong," which is perhaps the very denial of those empathetic characteristics that their family saw in them and wanted to reconstrue because they couldn't handle the truth or the tension of what was happening in the family system. I'm also hesitant to identify with those empathetic characteristics I think because I was caught in a double bind --those characteristics made me strong, and I was supposed to be the saviour of the family, using my strength to help them, which is the part of the "story" that I feel like I have to be careful with. Scapegoats are very willing, according to Scapegoating in Families, to fulfil their role as saviour to keep the family together, and subconsciously take on that "bad" behaviour.

Any dynamic goes into imbalanced chaos when one of its balancing components either changes or falls away. It's always been so easy for me to think of the family as villains versus victims, but what if it's more of a partnership of imbalanced behaviors driven by a family of imbalanced emotions? What if they need me to heal from their "abuse" as much as I need me to heal from it? What if it's more like if I heal, they heal too?

I wrote about this in my journal, but the Scapegoating in Families book goes into more detail about how the family functions as a system and scapegoating is used to provide an outlet for tensions in the family, which is meant to help the survival of the family. So, the child takes it all on as the saviour (but also the burden bearer) where they are IMO acutely aware of their own annihilation for not doing these things. I would be curious about healing yourself to heal others as it perhaps it is more of the same and that by doing this you are then "saving" your family and still trying to fulfil the scapegoat role?

When I combine that sentiment with Chart's, Dolly's and NarcKiddo's thoughts on how the whole family falls into the trap of putting their blame onto someone willing to hold it for them, I see how the less willing I am to take their blame, the more chances we all have at learning how to be accountable for our own dysfunctional feelings.

To me, this is a great way to look at it PC. I know for a long time I felt like I had to prove that I was "right" and my family was "wrong," but it left a big gap for my understanding and ego where I knew that I couldn't be "right" all of the time, and I did/do make mistakes along the way. I was perhaps acting out the dysfunctional ways too that I was shown growing up, but I learned that I have to take responsibility for the things I do along the way too. I want to keep my side of the fence clean; it's much better that way. Not to prove other people wrong, but because it is much less emotionally messy, and I have spent a lifetime carrying other peoples' emotions thinking I had to sort it out for them, to save them.
 

This feels so much more real to me. So any time I allow someone to put their own shame onto me, Both of us, me and them, stop learning how each of us can be accountable for our own emotions and fears and shame and peace and love, etc

I think this sounds like a great boundary to have with someone where maybe you are more free to allow your self space to come out, and be the authentic you. I would also say that in my experience (and from the Fawning book) that it's not always a comfortable experience. Being more authentic is going to make some people uncomfortable.
 

I fear depression far more than I fear anxiety. I've been a Nervous Ned since the day I was born. Anxiety has saved me many times by keeping my guard up. Hypervigilance keeps me aware of danger. Any time I relaxed around my Catholic family or friends, I was vulnerable to their exploitations. So I'm terrified of being relaxed.

Perhaps this is the old scapegoat story though? Or a part of you is still living with that story of who you are?


PC, I also feel a lot to be able to engage in a discussion like this and explore what is going on for each of us. To me, this is relational healing, getting to explore what I never had a context for and a chance to explore growing up.
 

Did that make sense?

Yes, I get what you're saying and until I read Fawning, I would have said that being helpful is "good," and ultimately helping people is good, but there's a line where we are helpful, and then helpful because fawning is an ingrained trauma response that we're not aware of. Specifically, because of how we have been raised (ie the one to take it all on, not incite conflict etc). The Fawning book has really helped open my eyes to this (and there is specifically a chapter on Fawning in Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed) and think it is perhaps more prevalent in scapegoats.

Sorry to hijack your journal PC. I just thought this was an important distinction to make and am happy to move the conversation somewhere else.

Many times on this forum, I've said things about how I believe we are the strongest and most helpful people on earth. We're the "light of the world" and "the salt of the earth" and any other old saying that we've heard and dismissed. I see our suffering as a result of us knowing how unfair life is, and that's what makes us not feel okay with abuse.

PC, I'm glad you found something in this book and I'm sorry that your family did that to you. I also thought it was interesting that she wrote about how the family picks the strongest, most empathetic etc etc member, which is different from Scapegoating in Families: Intergenerational Patterns of Emotional and Physical Abuse (which I was also going to recommend tho it's more about the constructs so far in the family) where she and has a polarizing view of taking the "weakest" member of the family, which I don't agree with necessarily. I guess the story is who the family sees as the weakest, which is not necessarily true.

To me, I find the word "helpful" really loaded because that's the story that they wanted me to believe, that I had to be "helpful" and take this on to help the family survive, which of course, needing the family in any capacity, I did. But being helpful is also something that is keeping me stuck in many ways, and keeping me from my authentic self and a connection to healthy anger. Everything I did had to be for someone else because that's how I had to survive in the family.

My job was to "save" the family. In that role I had "love privileges". I got all the love I needed from her as in line with my training. Probably, at minimum, I had a sense of relative value as a baby. Although, when I'd failed to produce the intended effect, my "role" took on a whole new dimension. It was subtle, insidious, but it was implicit and everyone knew it, I was the strong one, the adventurer, the popular one... special. But of course the half-truth held an ugly reality just below the surface

Chart, I would encourage you to look at the definition of scapegoat more, or the examples given in the Scapegoating Families book where the scapegoat is the precise one used to save the family. I also put a blurb in my journal this morning about the relationship between parents and children of the opposite sex where the parent heaps praise on the child until they no longer follow the "rules," and then the scapegoating begins. Not that I want to project my own experience onto you, I just perhaps noticed the similarities.

And now who is being "helpful!" I am writing about this I guess in hopes of getting out of this place that I have found myself in since being a child, and the path to connecting to my own more authentic self, anger included.

Sending you all support,
dolly

Chart, I have started reading "Scapegoating in Families: Intergenerational Patterns of Physical and Emotional Abuse," and came across this:

"In some families, children are brought into the world to "bind" the family unit, "to keep the family together." Many couples are in conflict before the child is born, and they hope that children will help the marriage. When the conflicts do not disappear, they stay together for the "sake" of the children. The resentment they have towards each other may be transferred to the children.

Most of the time, if the child has not been scapegoated, he or she is likely to feel a strong need to get away from the family conflict and pathology...The scapegoated child, especially if the scapegoating is a lifelong pattern, will probably feel responsible for all thee family pain and want to stay physically and emotionally in order to make amends."

I'm guessing that you are the former perhaps, but thought it was interesting and worthwhile perhaps if it was the latter. For me, this scapegoating stuff is another very difficult layer of entanglement as well as an obstacle to healing.

Hey Chart,

I hope Schore's work is able to help you find some space in what you're going through.

Sending you support,
dolly

Thank you for your response PC. It's given me some things to think about. I get what you're saying and am happy that you've found that sense of connection for yourself, but also that that sense of connection was a way to better understand your Self and a path to your Self, so that you could be there for you when you need it. What's interesting, and maybe where some of the difference lies in our approaches is that I was once on the other end of that suicide equation (if I want to call it that) with my father who wasn't "saved" (again, lacking the word to call it). Maybe in a way, it has taught me the opposite on some level-- that the people you need to be there for you aren't going to be there for you.

I don't want to take up too much of your journal, but through the scapegoat book I'm learning about disenfranchised grief, which is grief that is not "acceptable" to be felt at the time. I learned that one of the causes of disenfranchised grief is suicide. Perhaps once I process my own disenfranchised grief that sense of connection will be easier, perhaps not.

Yes, the hug emoji is a tricky one for me too. Sometimes I feel it, and sometimes it just sort of feels like a band aid when people don't have the capacity to be there for you (which I totally get!), and something in my body has to sort of protect itself for reasons stated above. I also do feel a connection to you through your posts and our communications over the years and there is a real sense of earnestness and genuineness that does come through.

I'm sorry NK 

I know what that's like. It's like you're invaded, at least to me. I woke up the other morning thinking about how I had The Tibetan Book of the Dead when I was a teenager, and how when I went there my gm expressed what a connection she had to that place, not so much about my trip or interests. It was about her. I have come back to Tibetan Buddhism and it has had a big impact on me. I don't even realize that I say mantras most days as a form of "protection" and understanding, and I feel like perhaps this connection is partly obscured because it was "taken" from me. I'm sorry your m is trying to take something from you that you find important and enjoy.

Hey PC,

That's great that you've made that progress for yourself  Really, what an achievement.

My need to be emotionally "felt" by others, makes me quick to believe that's what others want also. I like being with people who want to feel cared about, and who want to care about others. So, I find myself wanting to share myself with people while they share themselves with me...emotionally. I assume that other people want to be heard and believed and cared about as much as I do.

For me, this is the tricky part. I had the experience where I was "loved" to the point of having no boundaries where FOO did things because they really "loved" me (well, they loved themselves). So, when people come too close like that it mimics the lack of space and self that I had with my gm. I also think, and I'm figuring out how all this scapegoating stuff applies to me, that I do one of the behaviours that scapegoated children do, which is called stuffing. That I don't express emotions etc because that was used against me. So, on the one hand I had to be extra open with my gm for example, but on the other with my m, I had to have this tough exterior (and the main thing is that no one did anything about it). When people are that open with me, I can't help to think what is their underlying motivation for doing so because with FOO it always came with strings attached, which I can understand would be triggering for those who wer cast out, or abandoned by their families. I think it's just a question of what our window of tolerance is.

Sending you support,
dolly