8 scapegoat child roles in a narcissistic family #narcissisticfamily

In today's video we're going to talk about eight different types of scapegoating in a narcissistic family. Stay tuned to find out more. Hi everyone, I'm Athena from Courage Coaching. Thank you so much for stopping by today. Now what does a scapegoat child look like? Scapegoating essentially means that somebody is unfairly targeted and they have a lot of shame, rage and blame projected onto them by another person. Now in an emotionally volatile narcissistic family the child is the one that will be scapegoated and it's usually one child in the family that tends to be the scapegoat and the other child tends to be the golden child. The scapegoat child is the one that carries the narcissistic parent's projections. Basically the feelings within themselves that the narcissistic parent wishes to disown. Those feelings are projected onto the scapegoat child and also this child will be burdened with a lot of adult responsibilities which is obviously not right. Now the reason a child gets chosen to be the scapegoat can be for various reasons. Things such as gender, birth order and maybe several personality traits that this child has. There isn't always a consistent choice as to why a child is made into a scapegoat. But the hardest thing about being made into a scapegoat is the fact that this child really can never do anything right. Basically they are damned if they do and they are damned if they don't. They will never ever be able to get their parents true unconditional love and affection. Because the narcissistic parent consistently devalues and exploits the scapegoat child, the scapegoat child struggles to develop a healthy self-esteem and a healthy personality. They don't have a healthy sense of self and this is something that they will carry into adulthood. Now a scapegoat child will adopt a certain coping mechanism. They will take on a certain role in their family in order to survive the trauma that they experience. The first role that a scapegoat child can take on is known as the problem solver. The problem solver scapegoat child is the one that tries to problem solve in the family. This child will try and take over any sort of crisis situation. They will advise or make decisions for their parents. They will manage a lot of aspects of the house and they may even earn money for the family. These children will possibly earn short-term validation and approval from the parents but unfortunately this will not last. Once the parents notice that this child is very good at solving problems they will make use of that and expect this more and more and of course this child will have to survive in the environment that it's in so it will continue to be the problem solver. As adults the scapegoat child may be very good in leadership. They may be very good in problem solving so they may choose jobs where they do something similar. Another type of scapegoat child is the caretaker. A lot of scapegoated children will become the emotional support of their parent so they will provide emotional or physical caretaking towards both parents or one of the parents and they may act as a stand-in, best friend, therapist or even spouse. They are essentially parentified into taking on an adult role in the family and scapegoat caretaker children will end up becoming healers in adulthood. They are probably empaths or highly sensitive but the problem is they will continue to do this in an unhealthy manner. When they are adults they will be people pleasers. They will be caretakers with everybody around them. They will try and do too much when they aren't required to so it's very important for a scapegoat adult child to realise that this no longer serves them. That this was only a survival mechanism when they were still living at home with their family. Another role that a scapegoat child takes on is known as the protector. The protector is the child that will step in to protect either parent or their siblings. The protector scapegoat child will be the one that defends one of the parents against the more abusive one or that will protect their siblings against the abusive parent. But this means that they will be scapegoated even more. That they will be abused even more for daring to stand up to the narcissist. Somebody who was a protector in childhood will grow up to be a very strong advocate for justice for those who are underprivileged in some way. So although this was a survival strategy when they were young this may help them become very very important advocates in their adult life and they will end up helping a hell of a lot of people. Which is good as long as they remember that they need to also put themselves first and not do too much. Another type of scapegoat child is the truth teller. The truth teller is the child in the dysfunctional family that will tell the parent that they are being abusive. They will speak the truth even if they get punished. The truth tellers are the ones that constantly question the family dynamic. They will fight against the parent when the parent tries to gaslight them. Truth tellers will also be severely punished as any scapegoat child will be. And truth tellers are usually the ones that will try and leave the dysfunctional home as early as possible and they will become independent and they will try and put their needs first. Another scapegoat child type is the perfectionistic type. The perfectionist or the overachiever. A lot of scapegoated children attempt to win approval by being perfect, by achieving a lot, by getting, you know, really good grades at school because they're constantly trying to impress their parents and this is how they try to gain approval. And they may temporarily get this but of course it never lasts. The sixth type of scapegoat child is the rebel. Now this is basically when the child rebels against the dysfunction in the family home. They may react really aggressively towards the unfairness of their role, of what their parents expect them to do. They aren't able to get any of their needs met and they generally compensate for their feelings of powerlessness by, you know, being quite angry, being quite naughty, being quite defiant. They would generally cause a lot of issues and they will be a very difficult child for their parents to deal with. The rebel child has a lot of anger early on and if they don't find a way to deal with this in a healthy way then this will affect them in adulthood. They will have a lot of anger that they don't know how to manage and this of course can be a problem. Now two other types of scapegoat child are the collapsed scapegoat child and the covert narcissist. Now these two scapegoated children are ones that had absolutely no support and they had very harsh neglect. They didn't have any source of comfort. They didn't have a healthy parent or another adult in their life to lean on. So of course it was very hard for them to build any resilience and they have become mentally unstable, quite suicidal at times. They may be consumed by addiction. A lot of these scapegoated children might even end up in prison. They may end up, you know, breaking the law and doing something that is very, very hard to escape from. Also it's important to mention that if a child is different in some way, so they may be gay, they may be neurodivergent, they may have something that makes them stand out from the rest of the children, then the narcissistic parents will scapegoat them even more. They will suffer even more. And this is something that I have very commonly come across on this channel. I've had a lot of people on here tell me how severely they were abused by their parents just because they were gay or just because they had autism. So this is unfortunately a very sad part of the scapegoating is that the adult child will end up having severe mental illness and of course covert narcissism is a natural result of having too much neglect and too much abuse and not having anybody around that could be a good example, you know, that could help this child see what good, healthy love and validation looks like. Now generally in a narcissistic family, the golden child will probably be the one that ends up developing narcissism, but the scapegoated child can also develop narcissism in the more covert form. Covert narcissists, adult children, were trained in childhood to be very submissive towards a more dominant narcissist and this kind of child has been taught how to become passive aggressive because they were never allowed to express any anger. So obviously somebody who's passive aggressive and is manipulative can end up These scapegoated children will identify themselves as victims a lot of the time just to garner sympathy, but they will also continue to be quite neglectful and abusive towards others in their life. So of course being a scapegoated child means that you could go either way, that you could, you know, thrive despite the abuse and neglect or you could end up having so much trauma and neglect that you weren't really able to heal from this properly. Now obviously the path to healing yourself from being the scapegoat child can be very, very difficult, very painful. You need to have the strength to deal with your difficulties, you need to have the strength to look at yourself and figure out, you know, what you're doing wrong, what dysfunctional behaviours you have carried into adulthood. It's not an easy path, it's not a path that's for everybody unfortunately. The path to healing if you're a scapegoat child is to find a way to establish safety and stability and trust in others and it's learning a lot of coping mechanisms to enable the adult child to become more self-compassionate, more self-aware and to understand what a reciprocal relationship looks like, to understand what empathy looks like, to understand what being a self-advocate looks like and to be able to express their anger in a healthy way and of course to be able to heal that very, very hurt and neglected inner child because that's what it boils down to at the end. It's healing that poor child, that inner child that was so deeply abandoned and so deeply hurt and rejected in childhood and this is obviously a process. They will be healing their trauma so they will probably live with CPTSD. So as we've spoken about before, CPTSD doesn't just disappear overnight, it takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of patience and a lot of self-compassion in order to make progress and in order to feel better and a lot of it is managing the symptoms associated with CPTSD which are dysregulation, being triggered, having a very negative inner critic and having very low confidence. But there is hope of course, you know, you can improve your life a lot with the right therapist, with the right coach. The more you watch videos on healing the better for you. There are a lot of great online communities of people that are all trying to do the same, that are all trying to heal and they are a very good support for each other. So if you can relate to this video, if you can find yourself in any of these scapegoat child roles, then please feel free to share. And of course if you have any questions at all then please feel free to send me an email to courageisallyouneed at gmail.com. Thank you so much for your attention today and I will see you very very soon. Take care everyone, bye-bye.