Were you a scapegoated child? FSA (family scapegoating abuse) is real abuse, I wonder if you recognize it in your life? Post on here and share

[user27357]

I hope we can share our experiences with this form of abuse, and help each other understand this form of trauma and the lifetime affects we carry from it. Thanks to all who make positive efforts towards all of our healing here.

 

[Movingforward10]

I wasn't. But my middle sister was. Still to this day.
I was the "lost child". Ignored.

It is very real and manipulative abuse. She, and I, believed the narratives about her. That it was her fault, because she is innately bad and misbehaved, that she went missing twice at the age of 2. Rather than she was left unsupervised and walked out of the house to find adults. Or that she "started a house fire" aged 3, with me as a baby, because she was so bad, rather than, again, us being left home alone again.
And on and on it went.

When they couldn't blame her. They then blamed me. Like when she did go missing as a teenager. I was the only one at home and they shouted and screamed at me that I was withholding where she was. If only I let them know then everything would be solved. Problem was: she was actually really missing.

So , yep, horrible abuse. Distortion of reality is dangerous.

 

[Weemie]

I was the golden child in our family dynamics. My mom was the scapegoat, my grandma has NPD diagnosed after she was so abusive to hospital staff where she was staying. This dynamic ended when she blamed me for putting her in hospital instead of moving in with her to care for her. I'm physically and mentally disabled and I also wasn't allowed to live with her since she was in one of those senior citizen homes.

For a long time I used my role as one of the few people who could tolerate her to help our family survive (often we had no food or clean clothes or utilities and she equated money to love). I was using her as much as she was using me for supply. I also tried to stand between her and my mom. She thought she could convince me to hate my mom since she was abusive a long time ago, but I don't have any negative feelings toward her since she was psychotic at the time (post partum psychosis) and ultimately changed when she got better.

My mom wound up severely damaged from 40 years of abuse and gaslighting, but she's out of our lives since I stopped going to visit her after the doctors determined my presence just caused severe distress. My grandma also knew about the trafficking that happened with me because we were quite close in my childhood, but she admitted right before she was hospitalized that she deliberately didn't contact anyone about it as she was afraid social services would take me.

At the end of the day we both had to navigate our roles within these dynamics and it affected me in the sense that I learned at a young age how to manipulate and grey rock and that probably had a small impact on how I am as an adult (severely under emotional and unattached, serious parentification from all primary caregivers, etc). My mom had it far worse though, I never took any of what she said personally but my mom still struggles with it.

 

[user27357]

my story is short, it happened fast and i have discounted the impact ever since.
Happy childhood, everything lined up for a good scholastic experience and happy in my suburban home with friends that were happy in theirs, bucolic really. No signs of trouble for 10 yr old me.
Moms sick, mom dies, and dad refuses to grieve or tolerate grief, decides we need a church and he needs a church approved wife and he marries one.
mom died in april, and by september all the moves had been made, new mom, new sisters, new home, new school (church school) new food, new rules and a new and easily assigned scapegoat, me.
Two and a half years later and i am orchestrating an escape, burning bridges and leaving a strong contribution to the chaos of that family.
twenty five years later and i dont know why i am unhappy all the time and PTSD is the net that catches most of my complaints. All that crap at home is easily dismissed by saying I have no reason to fear that i will be subject to a harsh regime of religious doctrine or punished for my rebellion, its not a factor or even if it was it was nothing in comparison to 25 yrs of traumatic events that dogged me personally or i signed up for as a firefighter/first responder.
Now I am seeing that in 2 1/2 years the cornerstone was in place that supported everything after and I am exploring FSA as outlined by Rebecca Mandeville in her book Rejected Shamed And Blamed.
A good read, I check alot of the boxes.

 

[Movingforward10]

It’s so easy to discount. it was normal.
it’s only when you’re forced to reflect that all the unease, the dismissing of what the situation actually was is no longer possible.

i don’t know that book. Might check it out.

 

[PlainJane]

Different things at different times with different people.

Something I carry with me is the tendency to claim responsibility for much, much more than I owe. I think that is because I learned to believe I was responsible for things I hadn't control over at a very young age; who knows? I am getting better at recognizing it and redirecting both my behavior and my expectations of others.