Do you walk around with a baseline level of fear that never seems to go away?

Do encounters in public feel way more dangerous than they should?

Is it hard to imagine living without this fear?

For some adults the experience of fear starts upon waking up. This is a vague but persistent fear that has haunted them for as long as they can remember. It can be hard to know what – specifically – you are afraid of. If you knew the source of your fear then you could at least try to do something about it.

So instead, life ends up feeling like a series of fear-triggering episodes. Maybe you’re walking down the street and see a stranger approaching. Your body tenses up. You wonder if you should make eye contact but that feels like it could be taken as an act of provocation. You also worry that averting your eyes will signal disrespect. You feel under their scrutiny as each step brings you near. All the while you’re aware that none of this is likely what’s happening in the other person’s mind. Yet it’s impossible to find a different reality to experience this from. Such private fear episodes crop up and then go away without any resolution. The only relief is that at least it’s not happening now anymore.

Such fear experiences can be confusing and even shaming. You may worry that you’re going crazy. At minimum, it can feel demoralizing. It’s so hard to believe that such harmless encounters are safe. They never stop feeling dangerous.

Afraid of the Parent You Needed

In this post, I’m going to show where this fear comes from. Children who grew up with a narcissistic parent had to get used to it. A high level of fear became part of day-to-day life. These kinds of private fear-filled episodes come from being afraid of a parent whom you needed. In its wake is the ongoing experience of fear that can only be managed – never solved. But learning why you experience such fear today can open the door to what’s needed to finally heal it. I’ll explain what sorts of new experiences can do this. And I’ll point you towards a free resource that can help you get started today.

My name is Jay Reid and I’m a licensed psychotherapist in California. I specialize in helping adults who endured childhood narcissistic abuse. I help them live from different assumptions about themselves. Different from the ones they’ve had to carry just to survive. In a nutshell, one child is always to blame by the narcissistic parent. That child is the scapegoat child. They have to live from two assumptions. First, that there’s something wrong with who they are. And second, that they’re less important than others. In other words, that they’re defective and undeserving.

The 3 Pillars of Recovery

We identify, challenge, and eventually disconfirm those painful ideas in a 3-step process. These 3 Pillars of Recovery are:

Pillar #1: Make Sense of What Happened

Make sense of what happened so that you know it wasn’t your fault. This means telling someone you trust today about what childhood was really like and what life can honestly feel like today.

Pillar #2: Gain Distance from Narcissistic Abusers

This means, again, telling someone you trust today about whom you’re moving away from so that you can feel supported in your efforts to protect yourself.

Pillar #3: Live in Defiance of the Narcissist Rules

Narcissistic parents typically require their child to see themselves as inadequate and undeserving. That’s the price of being in the same reality as the parent. This pillar involves experimenting with acting in opposite ways. Then you get to see if relationships today respond differently.

This post is about Pillar #3. I’m going to show you how to defy one rule in particular. The rule that what’s inside and outside of you is still dangerous.

Two Fears Running at Once

The scapegoat child lives with two fears running at once. The fear of what the narcissistic parent will do to them. Intrude, attack out of nowhere, punish, humiliate them in front of others. And the fear of what that parent will not do to them — notice them, care for them, or encourage them.

The real problem is that their narcissistic parent is not motivated to be a good parent. They prioritize their own feelings and see other people as things to use to feel better. And they use their scapegoat child to make themselves feel better. They do so by making this child feel worse.

This child has been targeted as someone who has to feel bad in order for the narcissistic parent to feel good. And yet, the child cannot acknowledge this in childhood because then all hope would be lost. They would know a terrible fact about their world. The person who’s supposed to love and support them the most has it out for them. So, the child insists to themselves that their parent can be good to them. They just have to figure out how to be a better son or daughter.

The narcissistic parent is still unmotivated to be good to their scapegoat child. This leaves the child in a perpetual state of fear for two reasons.

Living Close to Someone Who’s Dangerous

Scapegoating a child is a betrayal of the role a parent is meant to play for their child. The child has to deny that this is what their parent is doing to them. In order to convince themselves of this the child has to keep someone who’s cruel to them around. That means living in a world where they’re always vulnerable. Vulnerable to being devalued, deprived and dominated by this person. And the child must live in a state of ongoing fear if they are going to keep up hope in their parent.

The child’s fear has no solution. The only way to solve this would be to give up the parent — and for a child, that’s not survivable. What’s left is a fear that covers everything and can’t be solved.

Being Fully Themselves Is What Brings the Punishment

There’s a second reason fear prevails for the scapegoat child. It’s what happens when they become all of who they are. It brings on their parent’s rejection.

A narcissistic parent experiences their child’s growing strengths as an offense. That parent needs somewhere to put their own feelings of worthlessness. The scapegoat child has been that place. A child who’s coming into their own stops being this place. So the parent punishes the emergence — with contempt, ridicule, withdrawal, or attack.

The scapegoat child learns that being all of who they can be goes with being rejected by the person they need most. After enough of this mistreatment, something shifts. Just knowing their own capabilities starts to feel like the danger. They develop an inner censor to catch and dismantle strivings towards empowerment.

Put the two together and you get a life saturated in fear. Fear of the parent, and fear of what may come out of themselves.

When Life Feels Synonymous with Danger

As adults, such early parent-child dynamics can make life feel synonymous with danger. After all, the scapegoat child learned a hard lesson. There was always something to fear from without and from within. The child couldn’t plead with their parent to be more protective. That would have fallen on deaf ears. The same went for their own real feelings and instincts. They couldn’t convince themselves those weren’t something to fear. Those experiences led to direct punishment by their narcissistic parent. So how could they not be experienced as dangerous?

These traumatic lessons can result in feeling like danger lurks around every corner. Every gaze that seems to rest on you can feel like you’re being scrutinized. I think something heightens these experiences. It’s the fear of your own potential reactions to the feared people. Spontaneous strong reactions to others can seem dangerous. Like they’ll only lead to catastrophe.

The end result of living in such surrounding fear can often be avoidance. Scapegoat survivors may avoid external situations that trigger these fears. They may avoid internal situations that do the same. Maybe this means avoiding going out in public except when absolutely necessary. Or denying any feelings towards others except what’s expected to be acceptable. This can eliminate formerly forbidden feelings like anger or pride. Then interactions can feel stale and unappealing. Life can become solitary.

How Fear Gets Unlearned

The solution to too much fear is simple in theory but hard in practice. Fear is an emotion that adheres to the principles of behavioral conditioning. The stimuli that can trigger fear for scapegoat survivors come in two kinds. First, interactions with external people. And second, interactions with internal experience. These stimuli once were paired with grave danger. The danger of losing the needed relationship with the narcissistic parent. But the early lesson was imprinted on us so strongly. It takes a lot of new experience to break the conditioning. In short, you need to expose yourself to these stimuli for long enough. Your conscious and unconscious mind get to see that nothing dangerous happens anymore.

The graph below illustrates what I’m describing. The blue line shows fear rising as you encounter the stimulus. Stay exposed to the stimulus for long enough and nothing bad happens. Fear then naturally starts to subside. But avoidance can end the exposure prematurely. That’s the red line. Then you have to go back to the starting point. The fear doesn’t get extinguished.

A Free Tool: Working Through Fear

I’ve created a free tool to help with this. It’s called Working Through Fear for Scapegoat Survivors. It helps you organize where life feels dangerous today. And it shows how you can systematically expose yourself to these situations. You get to see if they are still, in fact, dangerous or not. In so doing, you get to defy the narcissist’s rules. You see what happens when you do. And your entire system learns it’s now safe.

To get it, just click the button below.

Get the Free Tool

Watch the full video here:

Jay Reid is a licensed therapist (LPCC #4195) in private practice in California, specializing in adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic family abuse. Learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Do you find yourself in friendships or relationships where kindness is hard to come by?

Do you avoid people who are good to you because you think they must not really know you or there must be something "wrong" with them?

Do you expect to be rejected if your opinion does not match the other person's?

Scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents may actually feel better when they are in one-sided relationships. The reason goes back to how uncared for they were as a child, leading them to feel abandoned, anguished, and astray. I will call these the "Three A's" as we go along. To avoid the Three A's, the scapegoat child had to find a way to stay hopeful their parent could and would care for them if they could earn it. By adopting unconscious beliefs that they are defective and undeserving, the child protects this hope. Now when they experience the Three A's it is just because they are not earning their parent's love the way they should be. Their parent remains capable in the child's mind of providing what is needed. Although the child rarely receives actual care they can feel hopeful they will get it when they are around the parent.

The scapegoat child internalizes this pattern of interaction with their narcissistic parent. In so doing, they feel buffered from the Three A's when they are psychologically close to that parent and exposed to these feelings when they are not. Staying close can mean acting like that parent is around and in charge or treating oneself the same way the parent mistreated them. Scapegoat survivors do one or both by moving toward people today who treat them like they do not deserve much. Such friendships and relationships reinforce their internal connection to their narcissistic parent. And this internal connection staves off the ongoing threat of the Three A's.

Reciprocal friendships and relationships can feel threatening to the scapegoat survivor at first. This is because being treated well makes them feel distant from their internalized narcissistic parent. If they feel distant then they are at risk of feeling the Three A's. These safe friends and partners may offer care not available earlier in life. However the past trauma of not having it available can initially flood the survivor with the Three A's. This makes it very difficult — at first — to see that things can be different now.

The second Pillar of Recovery from narcissistic abuse involves moving away from narcissistically abusive people and towards safe people. The challenge of doing this is re-encountering the feelings of being ashamed, abandoned, and astray that arise when moving away from your internalized narcissistic parent. The promise of doing this is a gradual realization that the care you need from others will no longer be withdrawn at any moment.

How staying close to the internalized narcissistic parent protects the scapegoat child

A narcissistic parent does not show the scapegoat child love but instead uses them to maintain their own flagging self-esteem. If the child cooperates then they get to feel useful to the parent and therefore hopeful the parent will eventually provide the care the child needs. If the child does not cooperate and, say, expects actual care from the narcissistic parent then they feel something far worse. The child faces the actual absence of care the narcissistic parent has to offer without the anesthesia of hope for something different. Such encounters can throw the child into one or more of the Three A's.

Abandoned

The scapegoat child's healthy need to know that they are genuinely important to their parent does not get met. Instead they find a parent who is not interested nor genuinely concerned about them. The scapegoat child may get some attention for superficial attributes. However, they feel utterly alone in their inner worlds. They feel abandoned.

Roy always felt a pressure inside to be doing or thinking something. If he paused, he would feel a terrible state come over him. From the moment he awoke to when he went to sleep he felt like he had to stay ahead of this feeling. Action in thought or deed was the only thing that had worked for him.

Eventually Roy grew to understand that the feeling he had been running from was that of abandonment. In therapy, we traced this to how unseen and uncared for he felt in his home growing up. His father was narcissistic and treated Roy as if he could not do anything right. His mother was emotionally uninvolved and paid him little attention. As Roy grew closer to me and certain caring friends in his life he was able to see how abandoned he felt in relation to his parents.

Anguished

The scapegoat child who does not find a way to stay close to their narcissistic parent faces anguish. This is a state of self-loathing guilt brought on by a lapse in the child's loyalty to the narcissistic parent. The child typically feels responsible for the parent's emotional well-being when it should be the other way around. They are burdened with the conclusion that what they do or do not do will make or break the parent. If the child acts in ways that supposedly break the parent then they will feel a torrent of self-blame and guilt for supposedly hurting their parent. Engel and Ferguson lay out this sequence — a child feeling responsible for a parent — brilliantly in their book Imaginary Crimes. The scapegoat child who stays close to their actual and internalized narcissistic parent is spared such guilt.

Roy knew to never ask for anything. Nonetheless he worried that he required too much from others. He was a good employee at his company but during performance reviews he expected to be told that he needed too much help to get his work done. Although his supervisors never told him this he kept expecting it.

When his partner would host parties Roy did not feel safe to pause and converse with guests that he liked. He felt compelled to constantly check whether everyone had enough food or drink. If nobody needed anything he would identify and solve potential problems.

In therapy we understood how being useful to his guests helped stave off the anguish he would feel if he did what he wanted at these parties.

Astray

The scapegoat child who does not make themselves useful to the narcissistic parent can feel profoundly disoriented and astray. As painful as being close to the narcissistic parent is, it is also orienting. The scapegoat child knows what to anticipate and how to react when engaged with this parent.

Since the narcissistic parent does not benignly stay in contact with the scapegoat child when they go their own direction, the child can feel painfully astray. The child is psychologically lost in these moments without hope of being found.

Roy found it difficult to speak up in groups of people. He would let others set the conversational agenda even if he had something he wanted to discuss. He also had friends who seemed eager to talk more than listen to him.

One day at work, Roy was in a meeting with three people who had always seemed to appreciate him. One colleague asked Roy to share his thoughts about the project they were discussing because they were sure that Roy had some good ideas. As inviting as this seemed, Roy suddenly felt tongue-tied. His mind went blank and he did not know what to say. He felt astray.

Staying psychologically close to their narcissistic parent protects the scapegoat child and survivor from the Three A's. This means not expecting care from others and being useful to them. Doing this produces a less intense but ongoing dull pain that can be lived with.

The challenge of the second pillar

The second Pillar of Recovery involves moving away from narcissistically abusive people and towards safe people. This allows the scapegoat survivor to reawaken their need to be cared for. As important as this is to heal, it is also challenging. Forsaking this need keeps the scapegoat survivor psychologically close to their narcissistic parent and away from the Three A's. Embracing it can require the survivor to re-encounter the Three A's. This time, however, there can be a different ending to these difficult states.

The promise of the second pillar

The scapegoat child had to avoid the Three A's because there would be no end to the pain involved. They were stuck with their narcissistic parent and could not get the care that would have truly mended these states. When the scapegoat survivor puts the second Pillar of Recovery into practice there is a new hope. Now the safe other people they move towards can — in fact — offer the care they have been seeking.

This does not mean that the scapegoat survivor will not have to re-encounter the Three A's. It does mean that re-encountering these painful states can eventually yield to a quality of life that feels much safer and fulfilling. Here is how:

1. The scapegoat survivor begins to notice who treats them well and who does not in their life.

2. They spend more time and energy with the former and less with the latter.

3. They move away from being useful to others and towards expecting care from them.

4. They can feel abandoned, anguished, and astray as they do this.

5. While they encounter the Three A's they remain in connection to these new safe friends and partners.

6. These new ongoing connections gradually inform the survivor that they can expect and get care as needed today.

7. As the scapegoat survivor grows convinced of this new information they can tolerate the Three A's more easily while enjoying a different and more real form of connection to others.

In short, the problem becomes the solution. Initially, safe others need to be avoided because that meant moving away from one's internalized narcissistic parent and experiencing the Three A's. As the survivor moves towards them today, however, they gradually experience the benefits of being treated well. Over time, the hope for the internalized parent to give what you have yet to receive from them can give way to the ongoing actual experience of care and respect from the safe people around you. The unconscious beliefs of being defective and undeserving that hold this whole arrangement in place — how they got installed, and how to dismantle them — are what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

Moving away from a narcissistic parent, partner, or friend can feel enormously difficult, and there are validating and compassionate reasons why. With practice, the scapegoat survivor can learn to assert boundaries that protect them from narcissistically abusive people today — and take advantage of the freedom and healthy entitlement that relationships with safe people offer. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for the scapegoat child grown up.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Do you have an appetite for information about pathological narcissism that is never satisfied?

Have you found diminishing returns in the helpfulness of this information?

Do you find it hard to focus on yourself after a deep-dive on narcissism?

People who realize they suffered narcissistic abuse can feel like Jim Carrey realizing his life is on TV in the movie The Truman Show. They can feel a sense of freedom and power in seeing that things were not what they seemed. They were not defective and undeserving as the narcissistic parent claimed. They felt this way because the narcissistic parent needed them to.

They may learn everything they can about narcissism. Anything to further clear up the fog they have had to live in. They are getting to make sense of what happened while in the throes of narcissistic abuse. At the same time, their quality of life may remain largely the same.

Past a certain point, immersing oneself in this information poses two risks. First, since the process of learning about narcissism is typically done alone, it can reinforce the assumption that you are all on your own. Second, it can strengthen the assumption that the narcissistic parent's opinion of you is more important than your own.

At long last: the first dose of information about narcissism

I cannot overstate the relief and clarity a survivor can feel when they realize their parent was narcissistic. They have had to live under the false premise that they were inferior and their parent was superior. Nobody likes to feel less-than. Understanding pathological narcissism shines a light on the path toward equal status.

The survivor gets to reframe their past. Whereas before, they may have recoiled in shame at how they were so disobedient, rude, or inconsiderate of their parent. Now they see that these accusations were the product of their parent's artificially inflated self-worth and entitled expectation that everyone reflect that elevated importance back to them.

This can result in a loosening of a long-felt knot inside. The knot of forcing oneself to believe a lie that their survival depended on. In this case, the lie was that they were objectionable and their parent was perfect.

Terence grew up feeling disconnected from his father. The man always seemed to have it all together but wouldn't let Terence in. Nothing Terence did in his own life interested his father. The only time Terence knew he existed to his father was when Terence approached him. Terence had no memory of his father seeking him out to spend time together.

At the same time, Terence felt a strong pull to show gratitude and appreciation for his father. If he didn't make eye contact with his father whenever they were near, then his father would grow nonverbally irate. He would start slamming cabinet doors and criticize Terence for not picking up after himself. Terence knew he had to make a big show of appreciation towards his father or face this backlash.

His father mostly avoided social occasions and friendships. He would make up excuses for why he couldn't attend social functions. When forced to attend, he would occupy himself on his phone, making it impossible for other adults to talk to him.

Terence felt unaccompanied by his father throughout his childhood.

Occasionally, his father seemed taken by someone else and would go out of his way to make a good impression. He would shower them with attention and admiration. Terence would look on with the painful conclusion that he did not matter enough for his father to treat him so well.

The consequence for Terence was low self-worth and disappointment in what relationships offered. One day he was perusing YouTube videos and stumbled upon one about covert narcissism. The speaker highlighted how such individuals tend to be aloof and avoidant yet entitled to others' warmth and admiration. This fit his experience with his father like a glove.

Terence was overtaken with a sense of clarity and relief. He began to notice his own feelings of inner emptiness and longing. He could understand these feelings as a consequence of his father's dismissiveness. And he could understand his father's dismissiveness as a consequence of his father's psychological problems. This beat chalking it up to his own unworthiness.

How learning about narcissism may go too far

This phase of recovery can also happen in isolation from other people. The survivor can find books, articles, and videos that help them feel understood in what they have endured. After a lifetime of being deliberately misunderstood, this is invaluable.

Survivors' core trust in others may be shattered at this stage. They have learned that closeness means being deprived, devalued, and controlled. They have then had to believe they deserved such mistreatment to keep their most important relationship going. It is enough to make one want to be on one's own.

They have also had to organize their minds around the demands and needs of their narcissistic parent. Sure, this has not been a comfortable arrangement. But it has been an arrangement that beats no arrangement. In learning about narcissism, the survivor can keep the narcissistic parent in the center of their minds while finding their parent's claims about them to be faulty. This is a hopeful and marked improvement from the parent being in the center and being right about how unimportant the survivor is.

Learning about narcissistic abuse is a necessary but not sufficient step towards healing from it. It is one of three pillars of recovery. The other two pillars involve finding safe closeness to others and centering yourself in your mind. These cannot be accomplished without new experience.

Learning about pathological narcissism can go too far when it eclipses other aspects of the healing process. When this happens, it can unintentionally reinforce the survivor's assumptions that they are on their own and that it is their narcissistic parent who matters most in life.

With this liberating knowledge under his cap, Terence immersed himself in more and more research on the topic. He read every book, blog, and article he could find on covert narcissism. He watched videos of the sort too. Weeks stretched into months, which stretched into a year, and Terence was awash in understanding what was really happening in relationship to his father.

At the same time, Terence still didn't feel close to anyone in his life or like he could live based on his needs and goals. He hadn't entered therapy nor found a peer support group to help him. The prospect of doing either brought up dread and anxiety. "What if they think I'm complaining over nothing?" "What if they think I'm the real problem?" "I just get too anxious and uncomfortable around others..."

Whenever Terence came up against these reservations, he would move back to the books and videos about narcissism. Perhaps there was more to learn that would make reaching out feel easier. He would feel relief from the dread and anxiety from earlier. As time wore on, however, he still did not reach out and found himself feeling alone and oriented around his father's psychology instead of his own.

Finding and connecting with safe others

The survivor of a narcissistic parent has learned that they are on their own. A narcissistic parent is limited in empathy so their child rarely feels emotionally considered. At the same time the parent feels entitled for the child to show them attention and admiration. So the child must abandon what they need from the parent and tend to the parent's needs. Otherwise they face the narcissistic parent's vindictive wrath for failing to reflect back their importance. The child's existence on their own terms is unacknowledged. They are left to figure out life outside of their narcissistic parent completely on their own.

Here is why finding attuned and responsive friends and relationship partners is so important. In order to be our full selves we need to know that we will not lose the care of others. Otherwise we have to be too occupied with securing that care to turn to ourselves.

The path to finding and connecting to safe people is not easy for the survivor. It requires doing what used to lead to the trauma of abandonment and rejection. This includes reaching out to others, telling them what you need and do not need, and allowing yourself to expect good treatment from them.

Defying the narcissist's rules by turning your attention to yourself

A child is born expecting their parent to deliver all of the psychological and emotional necessities to become who they are. The child of a narcissistic parent gets little to none of these essentials. To survive, the child has to deny this fact and find a way to maintain hope that the parent can become who the child needs them to be. This often means doing what seems to please the parent. The child's hope is that if they can make the parent happy, then they will get the affirmation and love they want.

What makes the narcissistic parent happy is for the child to pay more attention to them than themselves. Unfortunately this is a one-way arrangement. No matter how much the child prioritizes the parent the job is never done. The parent keeps expecting more. So the child is left holding the bag.

It is important in the process of healing to eventually turn towards and prioritize one's own experience. There are plenty of aspects of a survivor's experience that are not about the narcissistic parent. These aspects deserve just as much attention as the parts that adapted to the parent. The full machinery of how the parent got installed at the center of the survivor's mind — and how to dismantle the beliefs that keep them there — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

The path to paying attention to oneself is also not easy for the survivor. It, too, requires doing what used to lead to the narcissistic parent's narcissistic rage and abandonment. The survivor can feel vulnerable to these same outcomes when doing this.

Terence eventually decided that he needed to try something new. He came to see me because I specialized in treating survivors of narcissistic abuse. Terence expected to go over his upbringing with a fine tooth comb with me. He was surprised to learn that most of my attention was on the person he was today. We talked about what he wanted out of his life and what stood in the way.

Terence worried that there was a right and wrong way to be a client and wondered if he was doing it "right." But I seemed equally interested in whatever he had to say. There did not seem to be a "wrong" way to be with me.

Terence brought up his lack of connection to safe others. We identified his fear of rejection as something that interfered with reaching out to them. Terence used his experience of my interest and appreciation in him to counter these fears. He identified a couple of friends in his life that seemed to treat him well yet whom he did not often make plans with. He deliberately began reaching out to them and cultivated an ongoing friendship with them. They showed interest in him and his life and offered him support for whatever was important to him.

After a while, Terence realized that he had not looked at a book or video on narcissism in quite some time. He reflected on how useful this information was for him. He was also grateful to be focused on new safe people and himself.

I encourage you to exercise compassion and patience with yourself if you find this applies to you. I do not want to be judgmental if indexing on learning about narcissism is still an important piece to your process of recovery. Ultimately shifting from this pillar of recovery to the others can be liberating. It also needs to feel survivable. If that time has not yet arrived, then I strongly encourage compassion and patience with yourself. That stance towards yourself does wonders and may even make it feel safer sooner than later to incorporate the other two pillars. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for the scapegoat child grown up.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Does taking good care of yourself feel like a chore that you'd better do "or else"?

Do you feel bossed around internally to do what is expected?

Do you feel "lazy" or worse unless you're doing something meant to improve yourself?

Sometimes a narcissistic parent takes a deceptive approach to abusing the scapegoat child. Instead of outright telling the child they are worthless, the parent attacks the child supposedly on the child's behalf. They claim the child doesn't know how to act "properly" and that these behaviors are going to get them "in trouble" in the outside world if they aren't "corrected" by the parent.

The scapegoat child is in a vulnerable position because they need to bond to their parent. So the child will work to do or not do what the parent attacks them for. A narcissistic parent may attack the child for not doing things that are generally positive. They may rage at the child for not putting their plate in the sink after dinner. Or scream at the child for being two minutes late for dinner.

A child in a loving home is not scrutinized in such a manner. Foibles like being a couple minutes late or leaving the dinner table without putting the plate in the sink are not capital offenses. As a result, the child gets to come to their own conclusions about the importance of, say, being tidy or punctual.

The scapegoat child has to be tidy and punctual or face the narcissistic parent's rage. Whatever the child has to do to avoid their parent's wrath will also feel coerced. At some level, the child hates having to meet the narcissistic parent's unreasonable demands while having no say in the matter.

Later, the scapegoat survivor can feel like they are betraying themselves when they do today what they used to be forced to do. The trouble can be when those things are otherwise good to do. So, the survivor can find the expectation to be on time unbearably oppressive. Or the prospect of cleaning their home can feel enslaving. The survivor may try to stay loyal to themselves by not doing these things.

This sets the survivor up to later resent doing things that are otherwise good to do. They can feel like they are betraying themselves. Recovery — which starts with making sense of what happened — eventually allows the survivor to see how they were betrayed by what their parents did to them, not by what they are doing to themselves.

Narcissistic abuse that is — supposedly — for your own good

One way a narcissistic parent asserts their superiority is attacking how the child takes care of themselves. The parent scrutinizes the child for the slightest mistake in table manners. In attitude and action, they rail at the child for being so "lazy" or "slovenly." They accuse the child of not brushing their teeth before bed. They infantilize their teenager by asking if they washed their hands after leaving the bathroom. They essentially treat the child as being incapable of caring for themselves. By extension, the parent is superior to the child for — supposedly — knowing better.

Limit the narcissistic parent's wrath by any means necessary

The child is in a no-win situation that they must survive. They already feel deprived of the basic respect, appreciation, and love that all children need from a parent. This puts the child in an ongoing state of dis-ease within. Something essential is missing in their world but there is no help. Against this backdrop, the parent's contemptuous attack can feel unsurvivable. The child is already under-nourished and is now being attacked by whom they would expect nourishment.

To cope, the scapegoat child must find a way to limit their parent's hostility towards them. If the parent targets the child's inability to take care of themselves, then the child must find a way to do this. They command themselves to keep their elbows off the table at dinnertime, make their bed in the morning, and wash their hands. The child has to boss themselves around internally to not give the parent a reason to attack them. This gives the child hope of being spared their parent's scathing disapproval. Without this hope, the child would feel too anxiously vulnerable to function.

Somewhere within the child they register that they are being forced to do these things. Like all human beings, they take great offense at the denial of their basic human freedom. It is far too unsafe to voice this offense to the narcissistic parent. Only further attack or invalidation would occur. So, this well-founded resentment has to be made unconscious.

The child tries to make these conditions more palatable by convincing themselves their parent is right. Now, the parent is doing them a favor by criticizing them in these ways. They are giving the child a map for how to live properly that the child would otherwise be lost without.

Alexis's father was narcissistic and kept himself emotionally afloat by acting as if he knew and deserved better than her. He relentlessly found ways to pick on her. If she cleared her throat he would make a demonstration over how "disgusting" she was. If she was speaking to someone in public around him then he would later tell her she mumbles. If she got dressed for school he would often tell her to go change her clothes because they didn't match. If they were eating a meal he would tell her that she eats too fast and is going to get fat that way. He would tell the same story about her not taking a shower for a week when she was twelve over and over. He would criticize her posture if she was just standing still. "Alexis you have terrible posture. Stand up straight." He would always accuse her of having a messy room and say she could not see her friends until she cleaned it to his satisfaction. He was rarely satisfied. Her father curated an image of Alexis as a slovenly, messy, gluttonous, and unclean kid. He got to seem like the paragon of organization, maturity, discipline, and cleanliness in contrast to her.

Alexis was confused by his treatment. She knew she was smart. She got decent grades at school. So why couldn't she do things that seemed so basic? She couldn't entertain at the time that she had a father who was propping himself up at her expense. Instead, she had to assume that she was stupid and prone to laziness. Her father was doing her the favor of correcting these bad qualities for her. She grew wary of her own judgment because she anticipated that he would "show" her how poor it was.

The only hope she had to limit his wrath in these ways was to make a show of how she was following his "rules." If he saw her going out of her way to spend hours cleaning her room, he would still feel the superiority he needed but wouldn't have to berate her to get it. The same went for her forcing herself to have good posture and asking him to evaluate it, or eating very slowly and making sure he noticed.

Internally, Alexis felt pushed around by this coping strategy. She had to command herself to take these measures. If she balked, then she risked her father's degrading attacks all over again. She would often feel like a "sell-out" to herself. This led to a lower self-esteem because integrity was such an important value to her.

The aftermath: resurrecting your resentment

Eventually, it may be possible for the scapegoat survivor to know how oppressed they feel. When no longer dependent on the narcissistic parent, they can take stock of their own quality of life. The survivor sees how their inner life feels like a series of commands they must obey "or else."

These inner commands reflect what the survivor had to do to avoid the narcissistic parent's attacks. The survivor may have an inner narrative telling them they are going to be late for work. As they wake up in the morning, they grow increasingly anxious. Their inner voice is yelling more and more at them to "hurry up!"

The survivor may grow to feel like they are cooperating with their oppressor when they do tasks related to their own self-care. Getting to work on time can feel like a feeble act of obedience rather than acting out their own value of timeliness. Cleaning their home can feel like something they must do or feel like a terrible slovenly person. Their narcissistic parent weaponized these tasks against them. Now, it can feel like the only reason to engage in these activities is to spare themselves the inner attack they will face if they do not do them. There is no real satisfaction to be felt — yet.

At this stage, the scapegoat survivor may recover a sacred form of protest. Instead of being left free to choose how they act, they had to do their parent's bidding. The survivor can now acknowledge that their worth is based on more than obedience.

Initially the survivor may direct their protest at themselves. It is they who are telling themselves to do this or that. They who are betraying their humanity by telling themselves to hurry up all the time. The only way to resist can often be to defy these inner commands. The survivor may show up late to work or not respond to phone calls or texts. These efforts are intended to restore their sense of freedom.

In her mid-twenties Alexis had obtained enough distance from her narcissistic father to reflect on how she felt in her life. Until then, her inner world had to be a means to the end of limiting the dangers posed by her father. She started going to therapy because she knew her life was not working. We forged a good working relationship and she began talking about what her inner life felt like.

"When I get up in the morning I feel like I have an endless amount of things I have to do. Clean my apartment. Start work early. Make breakfast. I know this is all normal but it feels like someone is holding me by the neck to do these things. Like if I don't, I'll be a disgrace to myself."

I asked, "Does this seem familiar to you?"

She said, "Yeah. I made my whole life about goals back since I was twelve. It made life seem possible. Just get the next good grade, do the next workout, or the next chore. Seemed like that gave me a fighting chance."

"Against what or who?" I asked.

"Seemed like me and the world," she answered.

"It also sounds similar to how insistent your father would be on doing his bidding. You had to treat yourself in the demanding way he treated you to protect yourself."

As treatment proceeded, Alexis felt a sense of acceptance from me. She felt like she had someone who understood her on her terms for the first time. This helped Alexis feel safe in looking at and questioning the commands she had formerly used to get by. For about a year in a five-year long treatment, Alexis expressed her protest. She worked out when she wanted to. She allowed herself to be a few minutes late to her sessions and to work. She allowed herself time where she had nothing to do. All of this was her protest against the inner tyranny of the commands of self-care.

Recovery: relocating the betrayal from within to without

The process of recovery for someone who has endured this form of narcissistic abuse takes time. The survivor had to grant ownership of their abilities to take care of themselves to their narcissistic parent. It can take time, new relationships, and therapy to recover one's felt ownership of these abilities. The goal is to know that when they are, say, working to be punctual it is because they value this quality. They no longer have to do this solely to avoid a harsh rebuke from themselves or others.

Consider the tragic scenario where human traffickers abduct someone. These captors regard the trapped person as their property and feel entitled to exploit them. If their captive does not comply, then they face unbearable punishments. To survive, the captive must leverage their sexuality to meet the demands of their captives. The captive no longer gets to feel like they own this part of themselves.

If this captive escapes then their relationship to their own sexuality will take time to restore. They may feel like they betrayed themselves by using their sexuality in the ways they did to survive. Initially, they may avoid sexual contact with anyone. They may be too used to the inner scenario where sex means being domineered and enslaved.

I bring up this example because, in both cases, something inherently good had to be handed over to someone else. For the survivor of this kind of narcissistic abuse, it was their right to take care of themselves. For the human trafficking survivor, it was their sexuality. If and when this initial traumatic situation ends, both can initially feel betrayed by themselves. They see their efforts to be on time or to engage in sexual intimacy as selling themselves out.

With time and the experience of being treated as a deserving person, the survivor redefines how they were betrayed. The problem was not what they had to leverage to accommodate their domineering narcissistic parent. The betrayal occurred in the parent's dismissal of the child's right to be treated with respect and love. As this new definition of betrayal takes hold, survivors can feel deeper compassion and respect towards themselves. The part of them that figured out how to survive their narcissistic parent's betrayal of them is no longer at fault. The full machinery of how those inner commands got installed — and how to dismantle the beliefs that came with them — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

In the latter two years of treatment, Alexis was more used to the warmth, understanding and empathy she consistently found in treatment. She began to like herself. She saw herself to be as deserving as anyone else.

"I've been thinking about what I want for myself," she said.

"Oh yeah? Tell me."

"I want to be around people who treat me the way I feel in here. I want to respect my feelings and those of people I care about. And certain goals at work are meaningful to me. I want to reach them."

"It sounds like that is coming from a place in you that gets to choose?"

"Yeah. I feel a lot less oppressed these days. I get why I had to treat myself that way. It was the only way to get through an impossible situation. But the problem was how I was treated, NOT how I coped."

Alexis got there through time, therapy, and the repeated experience of being treated as a deserving person. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for the scapegoat child grown up.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Were you able to do no right in your family growing up while your sibling was able to do no wrong?

Has your relationship with your sibling felt strained since childhood?

Do you hope for an alliance with your sibling over the abuses of childhood? Only to be told that you’re making it all up?

In families helmed by a narcissistic parent, siblings can feel like enemies. Like they’re on opposite sides of the Civil War. One of you was likely to blame for any and everything. The other may have been held up as a shining example of how to be. Under such conditions, children can hardly build their own alliances to each other. Doing so, would have felt like a betrayal to the parent who insists that one of you was bad and the other was good. And both of you may have felt how dangerous it would be to defy this parent.

In adulthood this type of divisiveness can persist. The one who was always getting blamed is the scapegoat. As adults, they may be more vocal about the injustices they suffered. The one who was constantly praised is the golden child. They may be more protective of their narcissistic parent and deny that there was anything wrong with how they were raised. Such opposition can feel like a dismissal of the scapegoat survivor’s reality.

Two Children, One Divided Parent

In this post I’m going to show where these two roles come from. Both reflect the divided psychology of the narcissistic parent. A narcissistic parent has to keep what’s good about themselves separate from what’s bad. They do not have an integrated sense of who they are. The scapegoat child is made to embody what’s bad about the parent while the golden child epitomizes what’s good. The parent keeps the good away from the bad inside their own mind. The same rule gets applied to the children. The scapegoat child and golden child are forbidden from growing close.

In adulthood, the scapegoat survivor may be more ready to talk about what childhood was really like. Their sibling may not. This can look like the former golden child denying anything was wrong. Or worse, they may perpetuate the devaluation started by the narcissistic parent. This can lead to traumatizingly invalidating and painful outcomes for the scapegoat.

I’ll explain how scapegoat survivors can protect themselves from this while still making sense of what happened to know it wasn’t their fault. Read until the end because I’ll point you towards a free resource to help you do this.

The 3 Pillars of Recovery

My name is Jay Reid, and I’m a licensed psychotherapist in California. I specialize in helping adult survivors of narcissistic abuse. The goal is recovering the quality of life they deserve. As a scapegoat survivor myself, I’ve worked to distill what works best in the healing process. This has led me to what I call the three pillars of recovery. All three pillars need to happen in relationship to someone who matters to you today.

Pillar #1: Make Sense of What Happened

To make sense of what happened so that you know it wasn’t your fault. This means telling someone you trust what childhood was really like. And what life can honestly feel like today. It gives you the experience of being understood and validated. That’s something we can’t provide for ourselves. It needs to come from another person.

Pillar #2: Gain Distance from Narcissistic Abusers.

This means, again, telling someone you trust today whom you’re moving away from. That way you feel supported in your efforts to protect yourself.

Pillar #3: Live in defiance of the Narcissist Rules

Narcissistic parents typically set a condition for sharing their reality. The child must think of themselves as inadequate and undeserving. This pillar involves experimenting with acting in opposite ways. Then you see if relationships today respond differently.

Today’s post focuses on the importance of Pillar #1.

Keeping the Good Away from the Bad

Someone who’s narcissistic cannot bear to know what they don’t like about themselves. Such information threatens to overwhelm them. They haven’t developed a stable enough sense of themselves. So they can’t hold their strengths and shortcomings in mind at the same time.

They insist that only what’s good about them is real. And they share that label with the sibling I’ve called the golden child. Meanwhile they turn what’s “bad” about themselves into what’s unreal. They unconsciously relocate these feelings into the scapegoat child. They treat this child as though they’re the bad one. In time the child has no choice but to take these feelings on as their own.

In the narcissistic parent’s psyche, what’s good must never touch what’s bad. The same must go for their relationships.

How the Siblings Got Turned Against Each Other

In short, the narcissistic parent insists on a fiction that they have no real shortcomings, only strengths. This gets to be real about the golden child too. It’s the opposite for the scapegoat child. The only things real about them are their – supposed – shortcomings. Say the scapegoat child tries to claim what’s good about themselves. The family reacts as though they’re claiming supernatural powers, not realistic strengths.

Children need to maintain a relationship to their parent no matter what. So each child must live with these definitions of what’s real about them. The golden child will have great difficulty seeing what’s good about their counterpart siblign. To do otherwise would be to step outside the only reality their parent offers. And the scapegoat child can’t view their own goodness as real. The payoff is getting to share in the same reality as their parent.

This arrangement breeds conflict between the siblings. They must carry out the narcissistic parent’s mandate. The good child belongs and the bad child deserves exile. The golden child may feel pressure to see themselves as superior to their – supposedly – inferior sibling. The scapegoat child may take offense at this treatment from their sibling. Yet they have no way to convince them that they deserve better.

In my work with scapegoat survivors I’ve come to a conclusion. The scapegoat child is afforded more freedom of thought than the golden child. This child is already being rejected. So their mind doesn’t have to stay in lockstep with the parent’s. In fact, this child’s protests may even serve the narcissistic parent’s scapegoating aims. The parent gets to say, “See, look how immature and out of control you get when you don’t get what you want.” Painful and cruel but the child does get to disagree with the parent.

The golden child must keep their minds in lockstep agreement with their parent’s mind. So they get far less freedom of thought. The narcissistic parent coercively controls the golden child. Agree with everything they say and do – or else. The “or else” is to go from being the favored one to the reviled one – just as they see happening to the scapegoat child on a daily basis.

When the Scapegoat Is Ready and the Sibling Isn’t

This freedom of thought can leave the scapegoat survivor more ready to address the past than their sibling. They may deeply hope to develop an alliance with their sibling. To serve as witnesses for each other over how they were both mistreated.

Too often this hope gets dashed when the scapegoat survivor approaches their sibling. The sibling can’t break from their forced allegiance to their parent. The adult who grew up as the golden child may find this far more scary. Thinking differently than their parent about the scapegoat sibling feels dangerous. Their whole inner world has been organized around one premise. That their parent is right about everyone and everything. To deviate from this is to question a major assumption that their mind rests on. So this sibling may reject or invalidate the invitation to join together in healing.

Making Sense of It Without Your Sibling

If this is the case in your own experience, it’s still possible to make sense of what happened. This situation illustrates an important point about this pillar of recovery. We often don’t get to do this with the person we hope. It’s natural to want to do this with a sibling who was there. Someone whom you may have yearned to have a closer relationship with for many years. It’s painful to be dismissed by your sibling but it doesn’t have to close the book on making sense of what happened.

Part of healing can be accepting a painful fact. The relationships you’ve wanted with certain people may not be possible right now. You get to take your own standards for treatment seriously today. This type of rebuke may then call for more protective emotional distance. The tradeoff is that you get to seek alternative relationships. Relationships with people who believe you, support you, and want the best for you. These people may or may not be members of your family of origin. However, they can allow you to safely work to make sense of what happened to gradually know and believe it was not your fault.

A Free Webinar: Leaving the Upside-Down

I’d like to point you towards a free resource to help you implement Pillar #1 in your life today. It’s a webinar called Leaving the Upside-Down: How Scapegoat Survivors Learn to Live Rightside-Up. So much of what I’ve described today points the same direction. The scapegoat child and survivor had to learn to live in an upside-down world. This webinar shows you how this world got built. It goes into the single most powerful step to dismantle it today. A step that lets you live from your strengths. It’s a step that can’t be taken alone. So the webinar offers ways to find trustworthy people to take it with you.

To get it, just click the button below.

Get the Free Webinar

Watch the full video here:

Jay Reid is a licensed therapist (LPCC #4195) in private practice in California, specializing in adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic family abuse. Learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Do you define the "real you" as someone who has low self-worth, is insecure, or anxious?

Do your own good feelings seem inauthentic or superficial?

Does life seem like it needs to be a struggle to feel real to you?

The scapegoat child to a narcissistic parent is no stranger to feeling bad. If this form of abuse is chronic and severe enough, the child can confuse badness with who they are. After surviving a childhood of narcissistic abuse, good feelings may feel inauthentic.

There are good reasons the scapegoat survivor may feel this way. But the pursuit of an authentic "bad self," while compelling, can still be false. A scapegoat survivor can take steps to make a good self feel real.

How the scapegoat child is led to confuse badness with realness

All children depend on their primary caregivers to be a frame of reference for who they are. Parents are in a particularly powerful position to signal to the child what about them is real. The ways the child is responded to will tend to feel more real than what goes ignored.

In good-enough scenarios, the child's parents appreciate and respond to the child. They hold a baseline level of unconditional acceptance toward the child. Then they notice the original expressions, traits, and ways of the child. This gives the child a sense that they are understood how they understand themselves. There is a comfortable symmetry between the child's inner world and how the caregiver responds to that world. The child feels real for who they actually are in the world.

The scapegoat child's unique ways of being go unnoticed by their narcissistic parent. Instead, the narcissistic parent sees this child as an instrument to get their own needs met. The child is earmarked to embody the worthlessness the parent cannot bear to feel.

The narcissistic parent cherry-picks faulty attributes of the child to recognize. None of us are perfect. The scapegoat child — like all children — makes mistakes. The narcissistic parent selectively responds to these mistakes with scorn and contempt. This happens against a backdrop of not responding to the child's good traits. A scapegoat child is left to conclude that the only things real about them are bad.

Greg was the scapegoat in his family of origin. His mother was narcissistic. She insisted on her perfection and found him to be the worthless one in the family. She would lash out in vindictive rage if she perceived even the slightest of criticisms or insults.

His childhood was an ongoing gauntlet of her and his dad finding fault in him. They would go to church on Sundays and afterward have breakfast at a diner. At that time, eating was his only source of feeling good. Greg loved food and would eat with great relish.

"Greg, chew your food before you swallow!" his mother would exclaim — bringing his father and sister's derisive attention toward him. On the car ride home she started a conversation about how Greg eats too fast with his father. "Greg just will not chew his food. He just swallows it down whole. He's going to become obese." Greg felt searing shame and intense worry that he was going to turn into something bad. He wasn't sure what "obese" meant, but he knew it wasn't good.

Greg looked out the window to get absorbed in what he saw and leave these feelings behind. Something felt like it was inside his nose. Greg stuck his finger in to get it out. "Ew, he's picking his nose now!" exclaimed his sister. His mother spun around in her seat with unbridled contempt. "Greg, get your hand out of your nose right now, darnit! You can't go around picking your nose like that. It's disgusting."

In the third grade, Greg was winning his weekly class spelling bees on a regular basis. Greg lost in an early round one week because he spelled "development" with an extra "e." As Greg came to the lunch table to sit with his friends, he said with full sincerity, "I'm really stupid." Saying that seemed like the truth. The feelings of dejection and disappointment in himself were what he felt so often at home. His friend Sally got up from the table and was so upset by what Greg said that she told his teacher. Greg didn't know what to do with it then but knew he felt protected. Greg was in a family where everyone picked on him all the time, and now someone was saying that he shouldn't pick on himself? That it pained them to see him hurt himself like this?

The only responses Greg tended to get from his parents were that he was defective. They ignored his strengths. Over time their continued emphasis on his mistakes led him to conclude that this was what was real about him. He assumed that when people saw and heard him, they recoiled in disgust like his mother. Of course, Sally offered a powerful example to the contrary, but Greg couldn't make use of it at that point in his life.

The siren song of catharsis for the scapegoat survivor

The scapegoat child is conditioned to feel real only when they feel bad about themselves. One way this can manifest as the child grows up is by searching for a way to wholly become this negative identity. Here is how and why this occurs.

The scapegoat child who is forced to think of themselves as bad also feels like something is amiss. There can be a lurking sense of not feeling entirely real and feeling incomplete. When this happens, the scapegoat survivor may seek to feel more complete by accessing and expressing how bad they feel about themselves. This, they have learned, is what is real about them. So ratcheting up these feelings should lead to feeling complete and authentic.

There can be a subtle hope that feeling one's badness will lead to a salvation of sorts. This hope may mimic the scapegoat child's understanding of why their narcissistic parent was so hostile. The child has to assume that the parent wouldn't be so contemptuous if they were better. So if the child can take full ownership of their badness, then maybe they can be forgiven by the parent and loved. It would be a salvation for the child in this predicament. Unfortunately, both forms of salvation are mirages.

The scapegoat survivor feels incomplete because the idea of their badness is inauthentic. The narcissistic parent's selective responses to their mistakes as a child were a fabrication. The intent was to get the child and the parent to believe the lie that the child was worthless. So the child is going to feel a gnawing sense of being inauthentic because their identity is built on a lie.

At Greg's first job after college, he received his first performance review. Before walking into his boss's office he braced himself to be told how bad of an employee he was. As he sat down, he said, "Look, I want to come clean with you. I don't think I've done as good a job as I can. I want to, so please don't pull any punches in telling me how I can improve." Admitting his flaws at the outset felt honest to him.

To his surprise his boss said, "Well, Greg, you've given me no reason to throw any punches. You care about your work. You turn in good to excellent deliverables. If anything, I would want to address your perception of your performance. I think you are short-changing yourself."

In a situation where Greg could be evaluated well or poorly, his sense of badness initially tried to take control. He "confessed" his underperformance and openness to being shown how to improve. This felt like he was being honest about who he was — in the way his family had conditioned him to think of himself. His boss's response highlighted how Greg was actually received in his world. But at the time, Greg found this feedback to be confusing and unreal to him.

Finding what is good and real in yourself

The task for the scapegoat survivor is to redefine what is real about themselves. To date, real may have been the same as being flawed. Recovery involves resisting the siren song of doubling down on this identity. Next the survivor can try what feels unfamiliar or even unreal. This step may mean tolerating feelings of being lost, disoriented, inauthentic, and anxious.

I cannot overstate how important safe others are to this process. As the scapegoat survivor moves from the narcissistic family who responded to them as if they were bad, they need responses from people who see the good in them. That is what will make goodness as a basis of their identity feel real in due time.

This process takes time because we are programmed to privilege our family's view of us. The scapegoat survivor has to surrender their allegiance to their family's view of them. This is hard by itself. Next, the survivor attempts to replace this view with safe friends' and partners' views of them. Although these views will be more accurate and kind, they will initially feel unfamiliar. The survivor may also feel disloyal for believing people outside their family. These feelings are all understandable and can be temporary. With persistence and time, these feelings can subside, and a new, more accurate definition of "real" can take hold. How the false definition got installed in the first place — and how to dismantle the beliefs that came with it — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

When Greg was in his mid-twenties he went to therapy. He knew he felt off inside but he didn't know why nor what to do about it. We started working together.

In the fourth year of treatment, Greg saw more clearly the ways he actually was in the world. He was funny. He was intelligent. He was warm and kind. He was drawn to woodworking. He was drawn to cooking. He also knew that when he did these things he felt unreal, anxious, and even depressed. It was the mutual understanding he had with me that helped him persist. He didn't feel alone in trying to make real the actual parts of himself that had gone unresponded to by his narcissistic mother.

Greg committed to acting these ways in the world as much as he could. Sometimes, when he was going to woodworking class, it seemed like every part of him was screaming not to go. And yet, he would proceed. Over time, his inner resistance to doing what was good and real about him subsided. He now had a supportive relationship with me that helped him understand these feelings and push through them.

This process itself took several years. Progress was sure but incremental. At the end of treatment, Greg could say that he had a new frame of reference for who he was that was good and felt fairly real. The old frame of reference would still creep in at times but Greg could now see it as a familiar but false inner state. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for the scapegoat child grown up.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Were you put down, neglected, or bossed around as a kid? Do those episodes intrude into your mind today?

Do you spend a lot of time on your own trying to see and dismantle the impact of this past abuse?

Do these thoughts interfere with getting good sleep, setting and reaching your goals, or being fully present in your relationships?

Survivors of childhood narcissistic abuse certainly need to recognize what they suffered. Otherwise, they may continue believing that they were at fault for being so mistreated. Yet they can find themselves caught in a cycle of dwelling on what happened. Thinking about how it shouldn’t have. And the agony of feeling like a narcissistic abuser “got away with it”. The result is a day-to-day experience of being enveloped in what happened. It can feel hard to interrupt this envelopment in the past. And even harder to focus on your life now and where you want it to go. It’s as if the felt starting point from where you have to live is back then.

Many survivors of such abuse are aware of this and want out. I’ve been conducting surveys with hundreds of scapegoat survivors. One of the most frequently cited pain points was getting caught in cycles of rumination about what happened. Despite wanting to break free, the pull to go back is incredibly strong. Survey respondents described replaying what happened, imagining what should’ve happened instead and trying to feel the outrage that wasn’t possible to show back then. But the end result is getting caught in this rumination cycle that:

• Re-awakens the abuser’s criticisms – even as you argue against them

• Makes it hard to focus

• Holds you back from giving your all to what matters to you today

• Disrupts sleep

Most importantly, this cycle of rumination happens in the privacy of their own minds. The burning questions, replays, and grievances get dealt with alone.

In this post I’m going to explain how and why survivors of childhood narcissistic abuse can find it so hard to focus on what’s happening today. Ruminating about the past reflects a healing instinct. It’s just that when those thoughts are kept private, the healing arc gets interrupted. I’ll explain why telling someone else about these thoughts allows the healing arc to complete itself. And I’ll address why it can feel scary to trust other people enough to do this. . And read until the end because I’ll point you towards a free resource to notice when you’re enveloped in a private ruminative cycle about the past abuse. You’ll build a tailored strategy to get your story from a private secret to a told fact.

The Scapegoat Role

My name is Jay Reid and I’m a licensed psychotherapist in California and I specialize in helping adults who survived narcissistic abuse in childhood fully engage in their lives today. In a family helmed by a narcissistic parent there’s often one child blamed for all of the family’s problems. This child is too “lazy”, “disobedient”, “rude”, “disrespectful”, “immature”, “pathological” or “impulsive” and that’s what’s wrong. These accusations are means towards the end of making this child feel bad so that the narcissistic parent doesn’t have to. See, such individuals carry an unconscious sense of worthlessness that they can’t tolerate. So they offload those feelings onto this child. When that child acts the part then the parent feels buffered from what they can’t stand within themselves.

Of course, this costs the child dearly. They must think and act as though there’s something wrong with who they are and that they’re less important than everyone else in order to be who their parent needs them to be. It’s all a fiction but the child is coerced into believing it. This is the only way to stay in the one reality their parent offers them. The child forced to play this role is the narcissistic parent’s scapegoat.

After surviving a childhood that had to feel real but was in fact false, there’s a healing reflex to figure that all out.

The Healing Instinct to Get the Story Straight

The scapegoat child was forced to believe lies about who they are so that their narcissistic parent could emotionally profit. The ultimatum was the threat of losing the person they needed most. This story was a distortion of who the child actually was but had to be believed nonetheless.

The healing instinct is to get the story straight. To see through the lies of your own inadequacy that the family’s fragile equilibrium depended upon. That drive towards knowing the truth no matter what it says is something I see time again in the scapegoat survivors I’ve had the privilege to work with. Something within the soul feels dis-eased. Like you can’t quite find a comfortable seat within yourself.

A Map to Freeing Yourself from Rumination

In my professional and personal experience in trying to see what works to help former child scapegoats recover get their stories straight. I’ve landed on 3 essential principles called the 3 Pillars of Recovery. These pillars need to happen in relationships today . That’s what allows you to see that you won’t lose people if you champion yourself - anymore.

The first pillar is to make sense of what happened in childhood so that you know it wasn’t your fault. The key is to do this with someone else. When this is done on your own it can result in the rumination that constricts life in so many other ways. Concretely, this pillar involves telling someone you trust what happened and your reactions to it today.

The second pillar is to gain distance from narcissistically abusive people today. So, telling someone who has your back who you’re moving away from so that you feel supported in your efforts to protect yourself.

And third is living in defiance of the narcissist’s rules. This means thinking and acting as though you’re an adequate and deserving person and seeing how trusted people in your life react today. Taken together, these pillars help scapegoat survivors break the ruminative cycle by fully participating in their current relationships.

Let’s look at why scapegoat survivors may want to go it alone in the first place and why that typically doesn’t work like they hope.

The Hazard of Making Sense of It Alone

The prospect of telling someone else what happened may feel too dangerous. Revealing your true thoughts in the past typically resulted in mockery, invalidation, and/or punishment. So, scapegoat survivors may feel compelled to figure this all out on their own.

The result is that all this new knowledge is acquired in what still feels like a world full of people who can’t be trusted. This makes it very hard for the new insights to meaningfully shift your day-to-day experience. It may seem like that shift is just around the corner but rarely is. Why is this?

Why Telling Someone Else Completes the Story

The definition of trauma is any stressor that exceeds an organism’s ability to cope in the moment. And the scapegoat child’s relational dilemma of either diminish themselves and have a relationship with their parent or don’t and be nobody to no one qualifies as a trauma.

Research has shown that trauma creates overwhelm in our mind and body. It’s hard to think in a truly coherent way in the face of such overwhelm.And one of the most tried and true ways to soothe post-traumatic overwhelm is through connection to others. In fact we have a component to our nervous system that senses for whether other people are safe enough to relax with. When we find someone who is, our heartrate decreases, breathing becomes normal, muscle tension goes down and we want to be close to this person. Along with this, our ability to think in a coherent and logical way about our own experience increases. When that happens it becomes more possible to see the fiction of this kind of upbringing for what it was. And to believe it. But this can’t be done alone. It requires the kind of thinking about past trauma that can only be coherently done when talking to someone else whom your nervous system finds safe.

All of these findings are part of Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal theory. If you’re interested in learning how this theory can be applied in the recovery process for scapegoat survivors, I made a video for it here.

So, when we try to do Pillar #1 and make sense of what happened on our own, the overwhelm that goes along with this story doesn’t get sufficiently calmed to truly make sense of it. Instead we tend to go over and over the content.

Overcoming the Fear of Telling

This is all well and good but the prospect of telling someone else what you have been ruminating about can feel scary for scapegoat survivors.

So, it can be very important to vet carefully whom you might risk doing this with. Relationship partners, friends and some family members may be receptive. It may also be worth asking yourself beforehand how they tend to respond to you when you share something that’s been distressful. If they’ve shown compassion and understanding, great. If you’ve gotten unsolicited advice, or gone ignored it may be worth trying someone else.

Another option is to go to therapeutic settings where you are highly likely to be received in a way that your nervous system will recognize as safe. Therapy is a great option. Another one is my Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class where you get to tell your story to a fellow scapegoat survivor in a way that’s structured to virtually guarantee a safe experience. As one graduate put it: “I think when my partner reflected back the experiences I shared I got to see the absurdity and toxicity in my experience. I felt compassion for the person who went through what I did.”

You can learn more about the group by clicking here.

A Free Tool: Breaking the Cycle

I’ve designed a free tool to help you step out of the swamp this week. It’s called Breaking the Cycle. First, you’ll write down the top five things you mentally rehearse about the abuse you survived. Then you’ll choose someone in your life who may be safe to hear them. If no one comes to mind, the tool walks you through finding a therapist who understands trauma. Finally, you’ll plan when and how to tell this person each item on your list. With each telling, your story gets heard rather than replayed.

To get it, just click the button below.

Get the Free Tool

Watch the full video here:

Jay Reid is a licensed therapist (LPCC #4195) in private practice in California, specializing in adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic family abuse. Learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Do you worry that something about you makes you stand out in a bad way?

Do you find it hard to live without thinking there is some sort of problem with you?

Do you worry that the more someone gets to know you, the less they will like you?

It's no accident that scapegoat children of narcissistic parents often feel self-conscious. These children have to embody the worthlessness their parent can't tolerate in themselves. Having to perceive oneself as objectionable makes a person conscious of who they are. They have to worry that others will "see" how defective they supposedly are. It becomes extremely hard to forget oneself and assume acceptance from others.

When a parent calls attention to the child's habits, posture, speech, gait, manners, weight, temperament, elocution, and/or intelligence, the child can feel like an object to the parent. Being an object to the person you depend on is an awful experience. You have no say in how they see you based on your definition of yourself. Instead you have to become conscious of and operate within their definition of you. For the scapegoat child, the parent's definition of them is biased by the parent's need to see the child as "less than." So the child is trapped in the parent's gaze, and that gaze is rigged to make the child feel different, disgusting, and devalued.

A narcissistic parent's scrutiny can make a scapegoat child self-conscious. The parent may scrutinize aspects of the child that are real but distort them into qualities to feel ashamed of. For example, a narcissistic parent who is insecure about their own intelligence may tease an intelligent child for being such an "egghead." Now the child's good quality feels like a reason for embarrassment. That child becomes conscious of a self that is preoccupying, shameful, and alien. The way out for scapegoat survivors is a new relationship where they feel understood and accepted from the inside out.

Why a narcissistic parent makes a scapegoat child feel self-conscious

The parent has to make up reasons to see their scapegoat child as lower status. These reasons then become prophecies the child has to live out. One of the ways a parent can convince their child of their lower status is by scrutinizing them. Instead of seeing the child's existence as fundamentally understandable and normal, the parent calls it into question. They pay attention to the child under the auspices of "noticing" what is strange about the child. Scapegoat children are often familiar with the dread of hearing their name in the narcissistic parent's mouth. This often involved the parent talking about their child in subtly humiliating ways.

Devin was big for his age as a first-grader. He liked to roughhouse with his friends and was infatuated with being strong. He'd watch the movie Hercules repeatedly because he was delighted by it.

One day he went shopping for clothes with his pathologically narcissistic mother. She looked at him and said, "Devin, you're husky. We need to find clothes that will fit a husky boy." Devin wasn't sure what that meant. "Mom, what does husky mean?" She said, "It means that you have bigger bones than other kids your age."

He went to try on clothes and she frowned and said, "Your waist is too big for these pants. I'll go get a bigger size." He was confused. He felt like she saw something wrong with his body but couldn't say exactly what.

The next week they were visiting his maternal grandparents and his mother said at the dinner table, "Devin is big for his age. I took him clothes shopping last week and we had to go to the Husky section." Devin felt embarrassed, but he still wasn't exactly sure why. He wondered why his mother was making such a big deal out of him being big for boys his age. He overheard her on the phone telling other parents about his husky clothes. He felt singled out and put down.

At the dinner table she would point out that Devin didn't chew his food enough and ate too fast. She said that was why he was too big. Devin felt terrible. Now he knew there must be something wrong with his body.

At around this time, Devin stopped seeing himself as a strong boy and started seeing himself as disgustingly overweight. He saw this when he looked in the mirror and feared that his classmates thought the same of him. He grew extremely conscious of his body and couldn't shake the feeling that it was a liability instead of an asset.

What Devin didn't know was that his mother was worried about her own weight at the time. She had been quite thin up until that point and seemed to feel threatened by having put on some weight. She transferred this fear of her own perceived defect onto her son by calling so much attention to his body. Although she didn't directly state he was overweight, her harping on the subject was enough to make Devin self-conscious. Seeing him self-conscious about his body helped her disassociate from her own fears of being physically unappealing.

What life is like for the scapegoat child

The scapegoat child is in the vulnerable position of needing to be who their parent recognizes. If the parent sees them as strange, then the child had better believe they are strange. To believe otherwise would risk diverging from the parent's reality. Better to be a defective somebody to someone than a nobody to no one.

The scapegoat child gets coerced into being the one who has something wrong with them. Just like Devin's mother kept bringing up his "husky" body, the narcissistic parent keeps insisting on the child's defectiveness. The child can't help but assume the parent is right to focus on their — supposed — defect.

Lastly, the narcissistic parent often finds some small basis in reality upon which to transfer their defective feelings. In Devin's case, it was that he was, in fact, big for his age. His mother used that fact to relocate her own weight insecurities onto him. Devin found her insinuations about him more believable because there was something about him that served as the hook for them to hang on.

Thus the scapegoat child is forced into being self-conscious about one or more aspects of themselves. There are three features to this self-consciousness in the child's — and later the survivor's — experience.

Feature #1: Preoccupation

It takes a lot of work for the scapegoat child to stay self-conscious. This is because their natural being doesn't correspond to what they have to be self-conscious about. The child is not — in fact — what they are self-conscious about. But to be self-conscious they must harass themselves with these reminders of their supposed defectiveness.

The scapegoat child is in a predicament. They want relief from the agony of self-consciousness yet find it impossible to stop. To not be self-conscious in these ways would be to have no relationship to their parent. It is always better to be anxiously preoccupied about supposed defects in themselves and known to a parent than to go unknown.

Feature #2: Shameful

The scapegoat child's attention gets called to their supposed defect because of the alarm bell of shame. They have been supposedly shown how they "really are" by their narcissistic parent. This information was received in a way where the child was seen as a defective object. For that to happen, there has to be a break in the subject-to-subject connection that we all want ideally. To hope to be seen from the inside and instead be seen as a defective object is inherently shaming.

Such experience overwhelms the child's abilities to cope in the moment. After a trauma like this it can be natural to rehearse it. The child can feel like they need to stay aware of it to make sure it doesn't happen again. Or if it does, that they can survive it this time. This means keeping the experience of shame in one's consciousness so that they aren't ambushed again by it. It's one of the ways CPTSD from a narcissistic parent sends the scapegoat inward.

Feature #3: Alien

No matter how much the scapegoat child has to torture themselves via self-consciousness, there is a nagging sense that none of it is true. This feature can be hard for the child to articulate at the time. Experientially, there can be a sense that the way their parent is treating them doesn't feel real. However, the child has to prioritize the parent's claim of what is real over their own. This means having to cling to an identity that feels ill-fitting yet necessary.

Devin now had to contend with the premise that he was objectionably overweight to himself and to others. It flooded his thoughts. He always felt on the verge of embarrassment for this. Shame was a constant and unwelcome companion in his world now.

Devin felt lost if he wasn't thinking of what to do about his defect. He also felt an underlying bewilderment when he was thinking about his defect. It was as if he had a secret language that skewered him, and he could only speak it with his mother. She spoke this language to him, and he understood it by thinking himself in the way she led him to. Outside of this pathological arrangement, this identity didn't hold. Devin had no other viable relationship with a caring adult to figure this out with. He was on his own in this respect. The only thing he could do was go along with his mother's ideas about who he was. This meant staying occupied with the shameful supposed fact that he was overweight and ignoring how alien this felt to him.

Devin functioned in his life on top of this bed of defectiveness. No matter what he did or accomplished, it was marred by this underlying supposed reality. It became a wobbly fact of life that he had to keep with him at all times.

How to escape the binds of self-consciousness

Liberating oneself from this type of self-consciousness is a process. There are two challenges in doing this. First, being self-conscious to stay close to someone important may be what attachment feels like. If that is the case, then a different way of feeling attached is needed before the old way can be given up. Second, the pull to feel self-conscious may get reinforced by finding friends and partners who also require it. The scapegoat survivor may not feel close unless someone is shining a light on their supposed defect.

Therapy can help scapegoat survivors overcome these two challenges. First, a therapist has extremely low odds of needing their client to feel self-conscious so that they don't have to. So you can be sure that you will not be with someone who reinforces your self-consciousness. Second, a therapist's job is to facilitate understanding of how you have had to define closeness and whether that makes you happy or not. This can empower the scapegoat survivor to identify the forces that go into them feeling self-conscious. As they participate in the therapy and are free from those forces, they can make different choices. For that to happen, though, a sense of attachment needs to develop in therapy. This alternative form of attachment must be experienced for the survivor to give up the only form of attachment they know. The full picture of how the parent installed this self-consciousness — and how to dismantle the beliefs that came with it — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

Devin sought therapy in his mid-twenties because he felt imprisoned by his anxious self-consciousness. He explained to me that he had found his appearance to be objectionable since he was young. Nothing we discussed seemed to change this in the first couple years of treatment. However, Devin consistently attended his sessions and he began to look forward to them as a place to relax and entertain whatever thoughts he had in the moment with me. He hadn't been afforded such a relationship growing up. People in his family couldn't communicate from a baseline sense of caring about one another. Interactions didn't feel safe. Devin was beginning to experience what safety in a relationship felt like.

Over time Devin was able to make more use of my interpretation that his current self-consciousness was a way to stay close to his internalized narcissistic mother. He didn't win an internal argument to "prove" that his appearance was acceptable. It was more like he turned away from that premise entirely. This was apparent in one particular session.

Devin said, "You know, I think I'm a healthy guy — psychologically and physically. It's kind of scary to say that, actually, but I think it's true."

I nodded and listened intently.

"I just had this image come to mind. It's like I was shanghai'd onto a boat where the captain and the crew told me there was something wrong with me. I walked around the ship and did my sailing chores thinking they were right."

"But now I feel like I have leaped off of that old boat and onto a boat that I'm steering and you are on board. On this boat I know I am healthy. I also know that you know I am healthy. It feels totally different but I'm still on a boat and going where I need to go."

This session demonstrates how Devin was able to give up the old way of thinking about himself in favor of what had developed between him and me. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for the scapegoat child grown up.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Have you heard that the scapegoat child is often the healthiest member of the narcissistic family but never known why?

Do you find this idea hard to believe?

Do you wonder how someone can be strong while feeling weak?

To those who know scapegoat survivors and the narcissistic parent they survived, it's clear that the survivor is psychologically stronger than the parent. This is often news to the scapegoated person. They've had to get used to seeing themselves as deficient and defective in relation to their parent. When a therapist tells the survivor that they were, in fact, stronger, it can seem like hearing something they've secretly known all their lives. At the same time, they may be skeptical of it. "How could I have been stronger," they ask, "if I had to tip-toe around a parent who was calling all the shots?" In this case, strength is something a person can possess even while feeling weak.

I recently saw this form of strength in the book and TV series The Handmaid's Tale. It's a story of a dystopian religious state where women's fertility rates have plummeted. The women capable of bearing children — called handmaids — are forced to become slaves of ruling-class families, where they must conceive and bear the husband's children under the watch of the wife. The main character is a handmaid named June who lives with a family where the wife immediately hates her for being able to bear children while she cannot. The wife goes out of her way to devalue and control June. If we understand this wife as pathologically narcissistic, then she uses June as her scapegoat. Yet to anyone who has watched the show or read the book, it's apparent that June is psychologically stronger than the wife. She wasn't stronger because she prevented the wife from abusing her. She demonstrated her strength in how she found a way to survive the abuse.

Being more powerful doesn't equal strength

A narcissistic parent often needs the scapegoat child to feel weaker than them. If the parent feels a core sense of weakness, then inducing weakness in the child can relocate that troublesome feeling. By seeing the scapegoat child as the weak one, the parent feels buffered from the experience. To do this they devalue, deprive, and control the child.

The scapegoat child only knows a life where their choices are not their own. They're left in a world of fear and undeservedness. They are coerced to feel less than the narcissistic parent — and they do.

The child in this position would be in disbelief if you told them they were actually stronger than their parent. It is hard to believe you are stronger than the person who has a boot on your figurative neck. Here is why it's in fact true.

Just because someone is in a position of power over another doesn't make them stronger. A narcissistic parent is in a position of power over their scapegoat child by sheer fortune. They haven't won this position by merit. They simply gave birth to a child who needs them more than they need that child. As such, it's entirely possible for the person in power to be psychologically weaker than the child. In fact, their weakness may get expressed by exerting power over their child.

If psychological strength doesn't equal power over others, then what does it mean? Four traits reflect true psychological strength. I see these traits show up time and again in my clinical work with scapegoat survivors. They seemed to help them endure the pain of childhood and find ways to heal from it.

Strength #1: Flexibility

The scapegoat child is inherently flexible. They can take others' perspectives. If the demands of a situation call for it, they can also go along with the other's perspective.

This trait is required to stay in the narcissistic parent's reality. The narcissistic parent's perspective is distorted by their need to deny their own feelings of low self-worth. The scapegoat child has to psychologically stretch themselves to live in the parent's perspective.

Flexibility often gets mistaken for not having a backbone. Scapegoat survivors may criticize themselves for supposedly "bending to the narcissistic parent's will." That view leaves out the fact that survival meant finding a way to share in the parent's reality. Their psychological flexibility allowed them to do this.

And not everyone possesses such flexibility. The narcissistic parent, for example, demonstrates extreme rigidity in their perspective. They must guard their inflated yet fragile self-worth, so they can only hold perspectives that conform.

A scapegoat child learns that the narcissistic parent will take everything personally. Whatever happens around the parent will be seen as a referendum on the parent's worthiness. The narcissistic parent is unable to consider other perspectives. Their psychology has formed too rigidly to defend themselves from threatening information.

John found himself able to relate to a wide variety of people. In high school he worked at a car wash with coworkers who were 20 years older. On his basketball team he got along with his teammates. He found ways to connect with his teachers. It seemed easy to him to pay attention to someone and figure out where they were coming from. He could meet them where they figuratively stood with little effort.

John also had a wrathful narcissistic father who cast all of John's traits in a negative light. When John got home from work and shared a good experience he'd had with his coworkers, his father's response was often something like: "Boy, you know just what to say to get people to like you, don't you? I bet they don't even realize what you're doing to them."

John felt a surge of shame as he suddenly found himself feeling like a bad and manipulative guy. His father must be seeing something that was plain as day. John couldn't even trust himself to realize how "bad and deceitful" he was.

In this example, John's strength of flexibility seemed to threaten his narcissistic father. To nullify the threat, his father distorted John's strength into a supposed character defect.

Strength #2: Emotional maturity

The scapegoat child demonstrates significantly more emotional maturity than the narcissistic parent. They are informed by, not dominated by, their emotions. They can do this because of their unusually high capacity to introspect.

The scapegoat child is on their own to navigate their feelings. The narcissistic parent casts this child as an adversary to them and the family. This leaves the child without someone to express and regulate their strong emotions with.

The scapegoat survivors I have had the privilege to work with are phenomenally introspective, and they use this to manage their feelings on their own. The scapegoat child may be endowed with an unusually high capacity for introspection. Introspection — looking within — requires the ability to be curious about what one is feeling. The child who introspects is trying to figure out what their feelings and others' feelings mean in the current context. They take their feelings as suggestions rather than facts about what is going on around them.

It's probably obvious that a narcissistic parent is emotionally immature. They are dominated by their emotions. They see their feelings as facts and navigate the world accordingly. Say the scapegoat child demonstrates an ability the parent covets, and the parent feels envy-based shame. The parent feels pain in relation to this child — therefore the child must be bad. They don't have the capacity to introspect and wonder why they feel such intense shame in observing their child's abilities.

John mostly kept a level head in his life. When his friends lost their temper on the basketball court, he was the one who would step in and get them to calm down. His school counselor selected him to be part of a student leadership committee.

His father couldn't stand to see John's emotional stability. Whenever he was in a full rage and John was speaking to him calmly, he grew even more furious. He hated that John was in control of himself and he was not. He would take away John's freedoms until he got to one that John really cared about. At that point, John would pound his fist on the counter or sink to his knees in despair. Then his father would exclaim, "Look who's throwing a tantrum!"

John possessed a great deal of emotional maturity. But his father's efforts to flood John with despair, then accuse him of being immature, confused him. He wondered how he could be so calm and collected at school but have such "tantrums" at home. It couldn't occur to him at the time that his father was goading him. John had to conclude that he really was the emotionally immature person his father claimed he was — and that his calmness at school was just an act.

Strength #3: Driven towards the truth

The truth matters a great deal to the scapegoat child and survivor. Though they've had to go along with their parent's distorted reality, they are bothered at a deep level that it isn't true. The scapegoat child's psychology is oriented to knowing what is real. Living in denial bothers them.

During childhood, survival demands they suppress their need to know what is true. Once they've gained enough distance from their narcissistically abusive parent, they can safely seek the truth. This means prizing accurate information regardless of how it makes one feel. Knowing what is true scratches a fundamental itch for the scapegoat survivor.

I see this propensity toward the truth every day in my practice. Scapegoat survivors are motivated to come to therapy to be able to live in unison with the truth. They have been pained by having to live at odds with it to keep their narcissistic parent gratified.

The truth they have survived is too overwhelming to know on their own. To paraphrase an important psychoanalytic theorist named Wilfred Bion: we cannot think some thoughts without another person. The thought that a parent cannot offer the love that was needed fits this category for the scapegoat child. Therapy affords the other person needed to think and know what happened. The reward is they get to satisfy their drive to know the truth. That drive may explain why scapegoat survivors come to therapy so much more than pathological narcissists.

In contrast to the scapegoat survivor, the narcissistic parent can live in denial of who they actually are and what they actually did in the scapegoat survivor's childhood. They may be incapable of tolerating the shame they'd feel if they sought the truth. They prioritize feeling good over knowing reality. They don't possess the psychological strength to do otherwise.

John sought therapy in his mid-twenties and began to tell me about his upbringing. I told him that his father's behavior was abusive. This confirmed something John always knew. He thought back to all the times he'd argued with his father that he was being unfair to John — to no avail.

After six months of therapy, John returned home for a holiday. He was brimming with excitement to tell his father how devalued he'd felt as his son. He was ready to recount his father's abusive treatment and expected to be met with a sincere apology. Instead, he was shocked when his father flatly denied all of John's memories. He told him: "Boy, you really know how to bend the truth to your advantage, don't you? Get out of here with these lies, John. I raised you right and if you think different then that's your problem, not mine."

John's concern with setting the record straight about the past reflected his drive toward the truth. His father showed his willingness to deny the truth to avoid feeling bad by dismissing John's claims.

Strength #4: Empathy

The scapegoat child can perceive and care about the feelings of others. This is so despite receiving very little of the same from their narcissistic parent.

Similar to flexibility, a scapegoat survivor may wonder why empathy is a strength. They may see their empathy for the narcissistic parent as what led to being exploited. I think that view loses sight of the fact that the child's survival depended on meeting the narcissistic parent's emotional demands. The scapegoat child who could empathically understand their parent's vulnerability to feeling worthless stood a better chance at surviving. This understanding allowed the child to avoid actions their parent perceived as offensive.

Outside the context of the narcissistic parent, empathy is also a strength. Being able to attune to and care about someone else's feelings leads to healthy relationships. Healthy people are drawn to being understood and having their feelings matter to someone else. The scapegoat child and survivor's capacity for this often leads to being quite popular outside the family.

The narcissistic parent is bereft of this strength. Their lack of empathy may be what makes it possible to abuse their child without concern for the child's wellbeing. They navigate life by seeing who can add to their exaggerated self-worth. There is a glaring incapacity to care about the inner worlds of those others. As a result, pathologically narcissistic people are unable to sustain reciprocal relationships. This can lead to a pattern of broken or unsatisfying relationships.

John was acutely aware of his father's feelings in any given moment. He could predict what types of circumstances would lead to his father feeling slighted and therefore hostile. He would use his empathic awareness of his father's feelings to try to prevent explosions of rage as much as he could.

For example, John knew that his father would feel like he didn't matter if John asked for permission to join his friends at a party. So John would be sure to tell his father how much he appreciated him in the days leading up to the party. Then on the day of, John would nonchalantly say that someone had invited him to a party and he didn't really want to go, but he didn't want to disappoint his friend. Then he would ask his father what he thought. Often his father might say, "Go to the party, what do I care?"

John employed his empathy to keep himself as safe as possible from his father's temper and find moments of freedom where possible. He bought himself experiences of socialization that were so important for his development. Knowing he had a way to get his father's permission to see his friends also gave him hope that sustained him through his adolescence.

Once John had moved away from his family, he was surprised to find how empathic people found him. His girlfriend, at one point, told him that she really appreciated how he listened to her and easily understood how she was feeling. John expected her to see this as something he was "up to," or that he was "just saying the right thing" like his Dad would accuse him of. But she meant it in a wholly sincere way.

As John continued in therapy, he saw how his ability to empathize with others was highly valued by them.

Give yourself the credit you are due

There is a particularly unfair aspect to the narcissistic parent's treatment of the scapegoat child. The parent is only able to offload their own sense of worthlessness onto the child because the child is psychologically strong enough to bear it. So the parent profits from the child's strength but won't credit the child in any way.

This is exquisitely unfair to the scapegoat child, because such credit might give them something they could rightfully value in themselves. They could see and know themselves as psychologically strong. Naming these strengths — and dismantling the beliefs that kept them hidden — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

As unfair as the omission of credit for your strength was in childhood, it is not too late to grant it to yourself. I think this can be one of the important outcomes from therapy. By working with someone who can see your strengths, they get to be something you know exists in the world. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for the scapegoat child grown up.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Do you have a hard time knowing what you want?

Does it feel like something bad is going to happen if you go after what you want?

Do you feel suspicious of your own desires? As if what you want is “wrong” in one way or another?

Adults who grew up with a narcissistic parent can have a hard time living from the basis of what they want out of life. Adulthood can feel full of blind spots. You try to see what’s important to you. What you want. What makes you happy. And the picture won’t come into focus. This isn’t by accident. Surviving childhood with a narcissistic parent meant cultivating these blind spots toward yourself. Meanwhile you kept perfect vision of what others need and want. That was adaptive at the time.

This is why it can be so challenging to know and go after what you want for yourself today. Things may go fine when you know what someone else expects from you. Projects at work get done. So does the chore list at home. You’re there for your partner, kids, and friends. But then those demands subside. You’re left with time to make of whatever you like. And things can feel super confusing, even disorganized inside. So you may watch TV, use substances, or find new demands from others to meet. These can relieve some of the distress. But they leave you directionless, cut off from your true purpose in life.

But there is a way to heal this blind spot. You can come to know and live from what you want out of life. In this post, I’m going to explain where this blind spot comes from. A narcissistic parent can force their child to abandon themselves. The child must serve the parent’s emotional needs instead. Then I’ll show how the child adapts to this abusive dynamic. That adaptation creates the difficulties I just described in adulthood. But then I’ll show you 3 concrete steps you can take today.

Steps that bring you back into focus and at the center of your life. And I’ll point you to a free resource that will help you put these steps into action immediately.

The Scapegoat Spell That Forbids Wanting

My name is Jay Reid and I’m a licensed psychotherapist. I help adults who grew up with a narcissistic parent. In the narcissistic family, there’s often one child singled out. They get the lion’s share of blame, rejection, and diminishment. That child is known as the scapegoat. The narcissistic parent has bad feelings about themselves that they can’t tolerate. Instead they foist those feelings onto this child. The message is effectively this. “You can join me in my reality. But you have to be the inferior one. And I get to be the superior one.”

Since no child can endure life without a reality to share with their parent, they must go along. The child has to convince themselves that the parent’s reality is true. So they adopt two beliefs. First, there’s something wrong with me. And second, my needs matter less than others’ needs. You can think of this as the spell that the narcissistic parent casts over the scapegoat child. Staying spellbound was necessary in childhood. But you’re probably reading this because you’d like to break the spell today. So let’s start with one part of the scapegoat spell. The part that forbids you from knowing and going after what you want most in life.

When a Parent Hunts Their Child’s Joy

Adult scapegoat survivors often know the feeling. What’s most precious to them got ripped away by their narcissistic parent. This may be done under the guise of it being ‘for the child’s own good’. If the child protests how unfair this is, the parent may say something like this. “I’m your parent and you’re going to do what I say.” When a narcissistic parent invokes that kind of logic it’s about dominating the child. Being in such a dominant position gratifies a narcissistic parent. It shores up their creeping, unbearable sense of inner powerlessness. That’s a feeling they must always keep at bay.

Now say the child discovers something that brings them joy. A friendship. A relationship. An activity they love. The narcissistic parent isn’t happy for them. The child’s burst of vitality threatens the parent’s sense of control over them. And the parent needs that control. It lets them keep their powerlessness housed in their child rather than themselves. Someone narcissistic also possesses little empathy for the feelings of others. So the child’s pain at losing their joy is no deterrent.

One anonymized client, whom I’ll call Ben, summed this up. His narcissistic mother saw his happiness and took it away. He had gone away to a summer camp in high school and made a dear friend. When he got back, he made plans to go visit his friend before the summer was over. He had his bus ticket and was all ready to go. He was bursting about how excited he was to see his friend again. That kind of excitement was out of character for him. Then his mother came out of her room with a snarl on her face. She told him he hadn’t done any of the chores she’d given him. It didn’t matter, she imperiously told him, “You’re not going anymore. If you can’t do your chores for this family then you don’t deserve to go off and do whatever you want.” Ben felt like the floor dropped out from under him. He felt so powerless and it made him want to crawl out of his skin. He had to call his friend and tell him he couldn’t come anymore. It felt like something precious in him got broken that day.

Ben’s mom was likely threatened by the bounce in his step after he got back from camp. So she manufactured a reason to deny him the source of his joy to devastating effect.

When Greyness Feels Safer Than Vibrancy

For adults who grew up like Ben, they can learn to blind themselves from what they want most in life. When you’ve got a parent hunting your joy, this is very adaptive. Denying yourself the sight of what you want protected you. It denied such a parent the opportunity to take it away.

Of course, this coping strategy can persist long after you leave the family’s home. It can keep depriving you of a life lived from what makes you happy. In adulthood, greyness in the day-to-day can feel more safe than vibrancy. Getting exposed to a person or activity that brings you happiness can feel good at first. It may then transition into a nagging anxiety that something is off or wrong. The survivor may then find reasons to dismantle the source of their happiness. Maybe faults are found with the other.

Or maybe you find faults in yourself that will douse the other’s seeming happiness with you. These conclusions are means towards the ends of fleeing the danger of having what you want most. Yet scapegoat survivors need to spare themselves this danger. That need can leave them feeling different from others.

Learning It’s Safe Now: The Three Pillars of Recovery

I use the term “safe” a lot in these posts. And I mean it in a specific way. See as a scapegoat child you learned that what was good in life felt the most dangerous. That’s especially true about today’s topic. Knowing and going after what you want most is generally one of the best things in life. Yet doing this endangered your parent’s willingness to care for you. So it grew to feel dangerous in a relational sense.

What was once relationally dangerous becomes safe through different outcomes. We find those outcomes in new relationships today. And there are three ways to see if a relationship today allows you to do and be what was once unsafe to do and be. I call them the three Pillars of Recovery.

First, is to make sense of what happened so that you know it wasn’t your fault. This means telling someone who matters to you today about the narcissistic abuse. What it was really like. When you’re met with understanding, validation, and compassion, you gain evidence. Evidence that the problem was how you were treated — not you. Second is gaining distance from narcissistically abusive people today. This involves finding people who back your efforts to protect yourself. They support you in stepping away from those who mistreat you. And third is living in defiance of the narcissist’s rules. In other words, you experiment. You do exactly what used to be dangerous in the scapegoat role. Then you see if this time nothing bad happens.

A Free Tool to Start Today

I’ve designed a free tool for you to deliberately apply these pillars. It helps you discover how much safer you may be today. Safe enough, perhaps, to live from what makes you happy. As with all these tools, I want to emphasize that they’re not meant to work overnight. Rather, this is a practice to develop. Gradually and incrementally, it builds evidence. Evidence that it may be safer now to go after what makes you happy.

If things don’t progress as fast you’d like, that’s understandably frustrating. But I would say such frustration has a rightful target. You could direct it at the abusive circumstances you endured rather than at yourself. The more patience and compassion you can offer yourself through this the better. That attitude, by itself, counters a lot of the harsh messages. These are messages you may have had to internalize throughout the narcissistic abuse.

To get it, just click the button below.

Get the Free Tool

Watch the full video here:

Jay Reid is a licensed therapist (LPCC #4195) in private practice in California, specializing in adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic family abuse. Learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Most children are encouraged and supported when they encounter challenges in life. The scapegoat child to a narcissistic parent isn't. If they encounter a challenge, they're undermined or ignored. Neither reaction by the narcissistic parent sets the child up for success.

As a result, scapegoat children — and the survivors they grow into — may avoid challenges altogether. The emotional cost can be too severe. They've been conditioned to associate challenges with feeling inferior, strange, and alone. The same dynamic shapes the family the scapegoat child grows up inside.

The problem is that challenges are a natural part of realizing one's full potential. To avoid them is to avoid one's full self. Scapegoat survivors are often painfully aware of that fact. They can experience a gnawing sense of not living as fully as they want to be. Yet the pain and felt futility of facing a challenge is too much.

One of the ways challenges can feel painful is in the experience that the scapegoat child is the only one facing them. The child can believe they are inferior, strange, and alone if something doesn't come easily. Those conclusions weaken when the survivor sees that someone they admire faces similar struggles.

Why challenges make the scapegoat child feel inferior

The scapegoat child is in a terrible predicament when it comes to their own self-worth. The narcissistic parent doesn't want them to feel good about who they are and what they can do. That would threaten the parent's ability to relocate their own worthlessness into the child. And yet the child needs to retain hope that they can figure out how to one day be of worth.

Scapegoat children may stay hopeful that they have worth by privately telling themselves they are great. In that secret place within themselves, they can insist on their worth. But that worth has to be based on exaggerated claims about their traits and abilities — claims that are inflated to counter the parent's message that they are worthless.

The child cannot bring those elevated claims into reality. Every time they do, they come up short and feel crestfallen. The child who secretly sees themselves as the smartest person in their class is crushed by getting a B grade. The child who sees themselves as the best soccer player is devastated when they don't make an all-star team. Those setbacks are so painful because the parent is setting the child up to feel worthless. A setback dunks the child in the tank of worthlessness they're working so hard to save themselves from.

Over time the scapegoat child may avoid challenges. Experience tells them that the only result is feeling inferior. They cannot see how life has been rigged against them. They assume that their privately held high standards are their own — and they aren't living up to them. This is part of why so many scapegoat survivors feel like they could never win, no matter what they did.

Rick rarely felt loved as a child. For as long as he could remember, he felt like a burden and an outcast to his family. His mother related to Rick as if he didn't know the proper way to live. If he was walking in front of her, she'd say he was slouching and needed better posture. If he was chewing at the dinner table, she'd say he swallowed his bites too soon and needed to slow down. If he was happy for any reason, she'd criticize him for being selfish.

Despite all of his mother's efforts to tear him down, Rick found a way to keep thinking of himself as likeable and smart. He'd identify which of his classmates he wanted to become friends with. Then he'd set about talking to them and playing with them at recess. Over time a friendship would develop.

In third grade, Rick saw that some of the kids got taken to a special class during the afternoons. He asked his teacher why, and she told him they were part of the gifted program. He resolved right there to gain access to it. He found out about the test he had to take and asked his teacher to recommend it for him. He took it and was told he had done well enough to join the program. He was elated. He felt like now he could finally believe there was something special about him.

His parents had to sign a permission slip to let him join. When his mother looked at it, she unilaterally decided he shouldn't be separated from his other classmates. Rick's heart was broken. He begged and pleaded for her to change her mind to no avail. Rick spent the rest of third grade feeling the sting of inferiority every time his classmates were gathered to attend the gifted class.

Having a private elevated picture of oneself doesn't necessarily make a person narcissistic. The scapegoat child can do this while still having empathy for others. It also doesn't mean coercing others to reflect back the elevated picture. It may just be something to be addressed in the recovery process. Finding a better quality of life requires a realistic basis for self-esteem.

Why challenges make the scapegoat child feel strange

Scapegoat children were often reacted to as if there was something uniquely wrong with them when they faced a challenge. To remark about the difficulty of something was to invite alienation. What is it about you, child, that you cannot easily do this? The narcissistic parent pushes their own self-doubt into the child and then recoils from it. The child is left feeling strange for finding a challenge to be difficult.

Jack was told to do a lot in his home growing up. Many of his father's demands were beyond what a kid Jack's age should be able to do. At age six, his father told him to clean the garage and that it should take him at least three hours. Jack felt a surge of frustration and despair charge through him. "But, Dad, I don't want to. It's Saturday. I want to go play with my friends."

His Dad responded, "Oh, Mr. Whiner. What is it now?" as he derisively laughed at Jack.

Jack felt the burn of shame added to his exasperation. His father was acting like it was a sign of weakness that Jack didn't want to clean the garage. The complete lack of validation for Jack's protest left Jack feeling strange for finding the task daunting.

Jack wasn't strange for not wanting to clean a garage instead of play with his friends at age six. If his father had validated Jack's complaints — even if he continued to ask him to clean the garage — Jack would have felt less strange. But his father used the opportunity to mock Jack for complaining. The mockery likely served to protect the father from feeling daunted by any of his own tasks. It was his son, not he, who found certain tasks challenging. The threat to his inflated sense of self-worth had been nullified at Jack's great expense.

Why challenges make the scapegoat child feel alone

The scapegoat child doesn't get the support and encouragement needed to find challenges attainable. Narcissistic parents see their own needs as most important. So if their child needs something from them, then that child is "selfishly" taking away from who is most important. That logic extends to the child who seeks help and support in the face of a challenge.

The result for the child is going without the experience of available help in the face of challenges. The scapegoat child who faced a challenge would look around and find nobody on their side to shore up their belief in themselves.

Rick wanted to be the fastest runner on his cross-country team in high school. At the first practice, he was beat handily by three of the other runners on the team. He felt dejected. "I'm nowhere near as good as I thought. I don't know what I was thinking."

He told no one of his disappointment because he expected them to react as if he was stupid in the first place for thinking he could be the fastest. He had to tend to that wound alone. He found his joy in running wither over the course of the season. His goal was no longer to be the best — but to not come in last.

A strategy to feel adequate, normal, and connected when challenged

I find writing to be important. As important as I find the process to be, it isn't easy. Some days, when I sit down to write, my thoughts are running around like cats. Instead of seeing the progress made in what has been written so far, I might only see the flaws. A lot of the time I can find some footing to proceed. Sometimes, however, I just have to put it off for the day.

I've always felt inferior, strange, and alone when those writing challenges come up. In my mind's eye I see the other people who write in this field and assume they face no such challenges. They sit down at their computer and produce 1,500 impeccable words with ease.

That shifted the other day. I was talking to a trusted friend and colleague who also writes. I have always admired their writing and put them in the camp of finding it easy at all times. That day I couldn't get underway with the writing. I was frustrated. It occurred to me to ask my friend if he ever encountered challenges when trying to write. I wholly expected him to look at me like I was strange and exclaim that he never has. Instead, he surprised me.

He said, "Well, yeah. I procrastinate all the time. And then I get frustrated with myself for not writing as much as I had hoped that day."

I said, "Really? Do you ever find that you can't gather your thoughts or make a linear argument?"

He said, "Oh, absolutely. Other times I'll have so many different thoughts racing through that I can't seem to organize them."

I said, "I always thought I was the only one who found writing to be hard."

He said, "No way. You are not alone. It is not easy."

I bring up that story to illustrate one way to combat feeling inferior, strange, and alone in the face of a challenge. Asking someone the scapegoat survivor admires — and who is likely to be honest — whether they find something challenging can counter the messages received about challenges from a narcissistic parent.

Benefits to asking others what they find challenging

Asking someone the scapegoat survivor admires whether they feel challenged in similar ways can help the survivor conclude they are not the only one. If someone the survivor admires struggles at times too, then the survivor can't be inferior for doing the same. These kinds of questions may help discover that the survivor is on a more equal playing field with those they admire. A narcissistic parent goes out of their way to make their scapegoat child feel they are of lower status. Finding out that the survivor is more similar than different to someone they admire when it comes to challenges can help restore a sense of equal status. The full machinery of how this got installed — and how to dismantle the beliefs that came with it — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

If the survivor is in good company when challenged, then there's less justification to criticize themselves. The scapegoat survivor gets to recalibrate the definition of what is "good enough." It no longer has to mean that everything comes easily.

Finally, the survivor can find it safe to regard challenges as a normal part of pursuing important goals. The person they admire is able to achieve important goals — yet faces similar challenges along the way. Challenges may therefore be expected in pursuit of anything meaningful. Instead of cause for self-criticism, they can be signals that the survivor is on a path that matters to them.

An exercise to de-stigmatize feeling challenged

This exercise helps the scapegoat survivor get firsthand information about whether they should feel inferior, alone, and strange for facing challenges. The steps:

1. Write down three goals that are important.

2. Write down all the challenges currently in the way of reaching those goals.

3. Select someone the survivor admires who is pursuing — or has achieved — that goal.

4. Find a way to ask that person whether they face, or have faced, similar challenges.

5. Record the results.

Whenever the survivor feels challenged and self-critical, they can refer back to that document. Over time, the scapegoat survivor may feel much less stigmatized for feeling challenged. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for the scapegoat child grown up.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Do you wonder why you were singled out to get the most blame, criticism and neglect in your family growing up?

Do you worry that if you don’t keep close tabs on yourself that you’ll be too much for others?

Do you carry a sneaking and dreadful suspicion that there must be something wrong with you? Otherwise you wouldn’t have been treated like the problem for so long.

If you were the one who was always the problem according to one or more of your parents then you may wonder why. As a kid, the most natural answer to this question is something like, “there must be something wrong with me”. This is especially the case when your siblings seem to be spared or even held up as examples of how you ought to be.

But you’re reading this post. Maybe that’s because you suspect one of your parents was pathologically narcissistic. If so, there’s a different answer to why you got all the blame.

The Real Answer: You Were Too Alive

Narcissism estranges a person from their real, spontaneous and vitalized center of themselves. That center is where life is meant to be lived. But someone with this personality disorder has a different center. What they experience there is an intolerable sense of worthlessness. So they construct an elaborate alternate identity. It rests on them thinking only flattering thoughts about themselves. These self-congratulatory thoughts provide a boost. The boost is short-lived and must be continually renewed. Having to live in such a thinking-centric way estranges them from the essence of being alive. So encountering someone who exhibits this aliveness can feel threatening. Even when it’s their own child. They grow envious of what this person emits that they don’t have. And it makes them want to pollute that child’s source of inner vitality so there’s nothing left to envy.

In this post I’m going to explain why that happens. Why a narcissistic parent tries to take away their child’s inner liveliness. The child who’s targeted in this manner becomes the black sheep or scapegoat of the family. Other reasons may be given as to why. You’re irresponsible, selfish, lazy, inconsiderate — the list goes on. But the real reason is that the child was just too alive for the parent to tolerate. Surviving such a childhood requires distancing yourself from your own vitality. But you can recover this. And if you read until the end, I’ll point you towards a free resource to help you start.

The Narcissistic Parent Who Hunts Signs of Life

The basic feature of narcissism is having a core sense of worthlessness that’s intolerable. So the person relocates it into the people around them. Then they devalue, deprive and domineer these others. The goal is to make the other person think that they, in fact, are the worthless one. The person on the receiving end of this is what’s meant by the term ‘scapegoat’.

But in some narcissistic characters, even this isn’t enough. Scapegoating another person doesn’t leave them feeling sufficiently superior. All of the maneuvers I just described lead to that thinking-centric way of living. This mode protects the narcissistic person, but it comes at a price. They lose out on living from a bottom-up sense of their own aliveness. Their experience can only contain what they find acceptable. And what they find acceptable is evidence of their superiority.

That’s not how life actually works.

Think about what happens when we’re honest about our inner experience. Sometimes we feel fantastic, sometimes really low and a lot of the time in between. When only good feelings are allowed in, no feelings get to be felt. We don’t get to pick and choose what feelings we have and what feelings we don’t. So, the narcissist lives apart from their own feelings. And feelings are the wellspring from which we feel most alive. So the narcissist’s solution to worthlessness leaves them feeling less alive too.

Why Your Aliveness Was a Threat

Now imagine that such a person is raising a child who’s brimming with life. This would delight most parents. But for this kind of narcissistic parent, it’s a threat. A child teeming with life can puncture their curated, thinking-centric world. It announces boldly what they’re missing — and what their child has a ton of. This evidence can call their entire project into question. By that I mean the project of living a life based only on the thoughts they want to think. But such questioning can’t be addressed due to the narcissist’s psychological frailty. Instead they must target and destroy what’s provoking these questions. And that leads them to their child’s liveliness.

So why did you get cast into the role of scapegoat while your sibling did not? It may be worth asking if you showed more signs of exuberant liveliness than your sibling did.

In upbringings like these, the narcissistic parent hunts the child’s signs of life. They can make it their mission to keep close tabs on the child at all times. They double-check every single thing the child does. They visit the child with criticism, evaluation and judgment . In essence, they take ownership over the child’s life. The lesson the child learns is that their life belongs to the parent, not to themselves. And if their life belongs to this parent then that parent is free to do with the child’s life what they will. In this case the parent wants to snuff life out so they’re no longer reminded of their own lack of inner light and life.

Dimming Your Own Light to Survive

It’s exquisitely painful to have your inner source of life hunted by your parent. Every instinct tells you to unabashedly cry out what you honestly think and feel. Yet it’s these instincts that land you in their clutches. Once you’re there, they pick you apart for living – supposedly – wrongly. The parent’s tactics are just a means to an end. That end is getting you to repent your inner wellspring of vitality. They need the scapegoat child to see their inner workings as the problem. And they have the leverage to make them do so. See, the child has to find a way to participate in the reality the parent insists on. This means the child has to regard their own source of inner liveliness as the problem. They dampen themselves to avoid their parent’s disapproval.

The child develops a belief along the lines of, “When I speak up, act out, or play my instincts I am offensive.” This belief calls off the parent’s efforts to extinguish the child’s inner light. But it costs the child the ability to live as they were designed to.

As adults, this belief can show up as an inner censor. The censor catches and inhibits any spontaneous expression. You may find yourself calculating meticulously. Is what you’re about to say “appropriate”? Is it “correct”? This process of internal calculation puts us in an analyzing state of mind. That state is contrary to living from the center of ourselves. It’s a subtle but very effective way that the legacy of having your vitality hunted can impact life today.

Learning It’s Safe to Be Fully Alive Again

Maybe what I’m describing today resonates with your experience in childhood. If it does, the next logical question sounds something like this. “OK, so what can I do today to know that it’s safe to be my full alive self?” It’s imperative to find and participate in new relationships and friendships.

The 3 Pillars of Recovery

The answer to this question lied in what I call the 3 Pillars of Recovery for Scapegoat Survivors.

Pillar #1: Make sense of what happened, so you know it wasn’t your fault. This means sharing your story from your own perspective to someone in your life today. You need to be heard, understood, and known in what it was like in your mind and body. That’s how, over time, you discover that it was never your fault.

Pillar #:2 Gain distance from narcissistic abusers today. This involves being in relationships that support your right to protect yourself. Especially from those who mistreat you.

Pillar #3: Live in defiance of the narcissist’s rules. This means living contrary to the parent’s claims that you’re defective and undeserving. The trick is doing it inside a relationship today, so you can see that nothing bad happens anymore when you do. The person who matters to you today supports your efforts. They don’t attack or withdraw the way a narcissistic parent might have.

Recover Your Vitality with Pillars 1 & 3

That’s where you can apply those two of the three pillars of recovery I mentioned earlier. In the context of such a relationship today, you can begin to talk about your story. What it was like to be singled out for showing the most life as a kid. How you learned to curtail such expressions. And how those lessons still come up today. Saying what happened to someone who believes you goes a long way. It helps you truly know, at a deep level, that your past suffering was real and undeserved.

And this is not an easy step for many. If you’ve tried to share your experience of what growing up was really like, but told things like, “Are you sure?” or, “I’m sure they did the best they could” or “Just leave the past where it belongs” then a core wound may have been reopened. Here is one of the worst parts of the narcissistic abuse inflicted on the scapegoat child. The parent repudiates the child’s own reality. Say the child thinks, “it’s not fair that I get yelled at so much.” They know how the parent would answer. The parent would insist that they only yell because the child is so bad. In other words, the child is getting hurt by the parent. But the parent denies that reality. In its place they impose a persecuting false reality. In that false reality, the child is only getting what they deserve due to their “bad” behavior. This attack on the child’s ability to know what is really going on can be psychologically deadly. After enough invalidation like this, the scapegoat survivor may grow understandably wary. Wary of telling anyone about their real experience. So, when you’re met in the ways I just described it can be re-traumatizing.

Maybe that’s how people have responded when you’ve tried to share your story. If so, the answer is not to stop sharing. The answer is to find a different audience. It’s important to find people who will believe you. That’s how you can finally experience a sense of safety in telling your story. There’s one way to ensure that you will get such a response. Seek out therapy or a support group. Ideally one designed for people who’ve survived abusive upbringings.

One such option is my Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class. This class teaches you mind-body tools. They help you notice, interrupt and redirect energy. Specifically, the energy that typically goes towards obeying the spell in your life. And you work with a fellow scapegoat survivor in carefully structured partner work. You get to tell your story. And you get listened to with respect, curiosity and validation. Graduates of the class always tell me the same thing. It’s tremendously healing to share their story with someone who “gets it.” Someone who’s gone through something similar.

Defy the Rule Against Your Own Vitality

Telling your story and being believed opens the door for Pillar #3. That’s living in defiance of the narcissist’s rules. The rule was to inhibit your connection to and expression of your inner vitality. Today you can be around people who care about you. People who celebrate your full expression instead of punishing it. Then you get to see what happens when you laugh out loud. Or when you say what you’re excited about. Or when you volunteer what your preference is. Nobody calls you “rude” for being excited, or “inconsiderate” for speaking up. So your system gets to learn something new. It used to be dangerous to be overtly alive. It may not be anymore.

A Free Next Step: Why Feeling Good Feels Wrong

Maybe you’d like to learn more about why feeling good can feel wrong — and how to reverse it. I’ve created a free webinar that does just that. It’s called: Why Feeling Good Feels Wrong: The Key for Scapegoat Survivors to Feel Pride in Themselves. You’ll learn a lot more about how this works. How a narcissistic parent makes the scapegoat child turn against their own strivings. Against becoming who they’re meant to be. Most importantly, I walk through in great depth the process that helps you know you’re now safe to do this.

Get the Free Webinar

Watch the full video here:

Jay Reid is a licensed therapist (LPCC #4195) in private practice in California, specializing in adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic family abuse. Learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

There's a saying that when you point a finger at someone else, there are always three fingers pointing back at you. There's certainly wisdom in that for people who are over-eager to blame others. For someone who survived narcissistic abuse as the scapegoat, however, that saying — and the concept it reflects — may need to be overcome.

The scapegoat survivor has experienced the narcissistic parent and colluding family members relentlessly pointing their fingers at the survivor. Then the survivor would be accused of heresy if they dared to point a finger back. The result for someone with CPTSD from a narcissistic parent is a crippling of the reflex to fight back or protest when insulted. The same dynamic shapes the family the scapegoat child grows up inside.

It's a two-pronged process of change to undo this self-crippling that once functioned as closeness. The goal is to be able to feel close to others while feeling fully possessed of oneself. It's a long road from the former to the latter, but a worthwhile one.

When there's nobody to consistently connect to

A child needs a caregiving adult who is consistently good to that child. Not perfectly good. Infant-parent researchers have actually found that the most securely attached infant-parent bonds happen when the parent attunes to the infant about 30% of the time. That leaves a lot of room for missing each other and space for each party to attend to themselves. What's critical is that there's an ongoing motivation and intent to be available to the infant. When that's in place, the child gets to find a person outside of themselves they can depend on, rely on, and ultimately trust. By finding the source of what they need outside of themselves, the child gets a sense of continuity with who others are to the child and who the child is to themselves.

When a child doesn't get this — as is the case for those born to a pathologically narcissistic parent — they have to turn inward to find the connection they seek. The child doesn't have a source outside of themselves consistent enough to count on. A narcissistic parent's self-absorption prevents them from being truly available to the child. The child cannot be an ongoing priority to a narcissistic parent even at the 33% threshold. This is one of the foundations of CPTSD from a narcissistic parent.

A narcissistic parent may take grave offense at the child not smiling back when the parent smiles at them and decide to put that child down and leave the room. Or that same parent may want to stay on the phone with an adult friend because the parent's status feels boosted, and ignore the child's pleas for attention. In those cases, the child learns that the parent's availability is highly volatile and can be directed toward others more than the child. The child doesn't have a person outside themselves they can count on, depend on, and trust.

Burrowing inward to survive

Now the child has to turn from the painful external reality toward an inner realm where they're freer to construct a world that's friendlier to them. That inner realm protects the child from the pain of the narcissistic parent's unavailability. It contains a representation of the parent the way the child wishes the parent was — rather than how the parent actually is. The inner realm requires delicate treatment of everyone in it to maintain the fragile harmony the child needs. Its function is to provide the child with a place where they can get their needs met without requiring anything more from the narcissistic parent in external reality.

As is so often the case when a child is abused or neglected, this solution creates new problems. Since the internal relationship to the wished-for parent isn't real, it's very fragile. As the external narcissistic parent goes on being devaluing, depriving, and controlling, the scapegoat seeks to make the encounters be over with as fast as possible. The child wants to go back to the inner world where they feel less under siege.

A new problem is created — now the child cannot intervene effectively with what's going on outside of themselves. The child's entire being screams to get back to the inner world when the external party starts being a problem. The child's own reactions of anger at the mistreatment have to get short-circuited, because they could draw the child further out into the external world with the narcissistic parent.

The way the child short-circuits their own anger is to blame themselves when they get angry at the narcissistic parent. That can happen in the blink of an eye. The child may simultaneously hate themselves while hating the parent in that moment for being unavailable or attacking. The child is very much pointing three fingers back at themselves when trying to point one at the parent. Doing so makes the whole endeavor of getting and showing anger toward the parent too fraught internally and externally to proceed with. This is part of why so many scapegoat survivors feel like they could never win, no matter what they did.

From the outside, it can look like the scapegoat child is surrendering to the parent or backing down from a fight. That isn't the case from the standpoint of the child's inner world. The child wants to get back to a realm where their internal others make sense and things feel less impossible. They've tragically learned that nothing good happens in the external world with someone else. It's best to go inward where things feel less unfixable. The parent gets to have their way while the scapegoat child has a way to ignore what's going on outside of them.

How CPTSD from a narcissistic parent shows up in adulthood

From where life actually gets lived — the scapegoat survivor's consciousness — the legacy of having to go into one's internal world to avoid danger (rather than mix in with the external world) can leave that person feeling foundationless when conflict arises. The survivor may do whatever they can — as they did with their narcissistic parent earlier in life — to make conflictual situations subside. The reflex to retreat inward is the body's old solution still firing, decades after it was needed.

What can be done about it

If a survivor had to burrow into their internal reality to save themselves from an external reality with a narcissistic parent, then new safe relationships will likely play an important role in making and finding allies in the external world today. The goal is to have a balanced mix of internal and external worlds. The full machinery of how this happened — and how to dismantle the beliefs that came with it — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

To recover, a survivor can try to find and cultivate relationships with people who offer safety. Instead of asking whether the survivor is acceptable to others, the survivor asks whether the others are acceptable. Evaluating the character of other people is often unfamiliar for the scapegoat survivor — but it makes venturing back into the external world a much safer endeavor than it used to be. That shift in perspective allows the survivor to populate their external world with actual people who treat the survivor well. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for those healing CPTSD from a narcissistic parent.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

As a kid, did it seem like you were flawed in the very areas you wanted to excel at?

Has it been a long time since you noticed what comes natural to you?

Do you feel like trying your hardest somehow always feels difficult and never enjoyable?

In my own experience and in my therapeutic work with scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents, a common challenge is living with what comes easy. As an adult, that can seem like a foreign concept. Being good at something seems like it only applies to others — never to oneself. And there’s often a lot of evidence to the contrary. Someone may be a treasured friend, or a loved spouse, or a valued contributor at work, yet none of it feels easy. The inner experience is that they have to devote every last ounce of effort toward making parts of their lives work.

Noticing what you’re good at requires turning your attention to yourself. And for reasons I’m going to explain later, bringing yourself into your own focus can bring an overarching anxiety along with it. That brings anxiety about what supposed problem you’re going to see when you look at yourself — and even more vexing is an impossible-to-explain anxiety over not seeing something wrong with yourself. What remains out of grasp is the experience of bringing yourself into your own focus, seeing and celebrating what comes easily without that nagging anxiety.

In this post I’ll show why and how the scapegoat child to a narcissistic parent has to turn what comes easy to them into something that feels hard. The child’s sense that they have someone there for them depends on this, so it’s not easily dismantled once installed. Then I’ll describe how this coping strategy can show up in the lives of adult scapegoat survivors. Most importantly, I’ll lay out the specific steps you can take today to know you’re now safe to reclaim what comes naturally to you. And if you read until the end, I’ll point you to a free tool I’ve designed to help you notice and recover how you may be making hard what comes easy to you.

My name is Jay Reid and I’m a licensed psychotherapist in California. I specialize in helping survivors of narcissistic abuse recover the quality of life they deserve. I think of the person on the receiving end of narcissistic abuse as the “scapegoat,” because they’re blamed for shortcomings in the abuser that this person can’t bear to acknowledge in themselves. To survive, the scapegoated person has to go along by living under what I call the “scapegoat spell.” This spell requires you to adopt and live according to two painful beliefs: first, that there’s something fundamentally wrong with who you are — you’re defective. And second, that you’re less important than others — you’re undeserving.

The Dilemma the Scapegoat Child Faced

People who grew up in the home of a narcissistic parent faced a tormenting dilemma. Such parents have exaggerated needs to feel and be treated as superior. Doing this typically involves making people close to them feel inferior. The contrast between themselves and the supposedly inferior person does two things: it gives the narcissistic parent someone else to look and seem flawed so they don’t have to, and it endorses the parent’s superiority.

The scapegoat child is in a pickle because they need this parent to love them and to value the love they’re offering. In order to maintain hope that either can happen, the parent, of course, has to be psychologically and emotionally intact. And scapegoat children often intuit that for that to happen, the child must be the inferior foil to the parent’s superior false identity. So the child can either keep hope alive that they’ll get the love they’re born needing — by feeling bad about who they are so the parent can keep feeling good — or see and like what they’re naturally good at, and puncture the parent’s fragile yet inflated self-worth so much that they’re in no condition to be a parent.

It’s never a real choice, because the child’s psychological survival hinges on having an intact parent. This means the child must not experience themselves as talented, gifted, or having things that come easy to them. Of course, we all have certain strengths and an inner drive to master our environment. When we can bring our strengths to master the world before us, we feel a deep sense of satisfaction, connection, and appreciation of ourselves.

How the Child Coped: Turning Talent Into a Problem

The scapegoat child must deny themselves this fundamental joy of being human. To allow it would be to flout the arrangement insisted upon by the narcissistic parent. That could lead to a dissolution of the parent and their relationship.

A child without a psychologically intact parent ends up feeling like nobody to no one. They avoid this grave danger by turning whatever they’re good at into a problem. Maybe they can naturally slug a baseball — well, they find themselves perseverating over their stance and form until they’re so in their heads at the plate that they can’t make contact with the ball. Or they’re naturally good at math, but they feel an unnamed yet intense anxiety whenever they sit down to do their math homework. Instead of enjoying the chance to do what they’re good at, they dread having to face the discomfort of this anxiety when it’s time to do homework. The same may go for writing, being a good friend, or whatever this child is naturally inclined and good at doing.

The “Cowardly” Lion’s Lesson: He Already Was What He Wanted to Be

I think of the Lion in The Wizard of Oz when it comes to knowing and reclaiming what comes easy to you as a scapegoat survivor. In the movie, he’s convinced he has no courage. He’s left his pride of other lions because he doesn’t think he can hack it with them. So he’s out on his own without any new relationships — until he sees Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow walking his way.

In the adventures that follow, he regularly risks his safety to protect Dorothy and his friends when they encounter danger. But he discounts his courageous acts by indexing on the physical signs of fear he experiences while doing them — shaking knees, trembling. When in fact he’s living out the very definition of bravery: doing what it is you fear. At the end, when they all finally meet the Wizard and discover he’s just a guy behind a curtain on a megaphone, the Lion is given a medal of bravery — not to instill courage, but to recognize the courage he’s already shown. We might conclude that it was the Lion’s new friendships that allowed him to feel safe enough to see that what he thought he had to fight and claw to become was something he already was.

This illustrates the importance of finding new relationships where you can practice two of the 3 Pillars of Recovery. The Lion found new friendships with Dorothy and the gang, where he wasn’t scorned for supposedly not being courageous enough. This was Pillar #2: gaining distance from narcissistic abusers and closeness to safe people. In the course of this, he got to practice the third Pillar of Recovery: living in defiance of the narcissist’s rules. The sense of safety he found among his friends may have signaled that nothing bad is going to happen if he embraces what he’s already shown about who he is.

A Free Tool to Reclaim What Comes Naturally

Like the Lion, scapegoat survivors may already possess what they think they have to go to the ends of the earth to attain. I’ve developed a free tool to help you see if this might be happening in your life. In it, you’ll look at what you’re trying to become in your life today, then find and examine evidence that suggests you may already be that. Most importantly, you’ll be asked to discuss what you write down in this exercise with a trusted person in your life. With enough practice, it can help you feel safe enough to shift your sense of who you actually are and what you’re capable of — from the imposed-upon defective and undeserving identity to one that better fits how you’re accurately known and experienced in the world.

To get this free tool, just click here.

Watch the full video here:

Jay Reid is a licensed therapist (LPCC #4195) in private practice in California, specializing in adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic family abuse. Learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

The adult child of a narcissistic parent often feels different from peers. They experience themselves as having less authority than other adults. They may feel less knowledgeable, less powerful, and less worthy of admiration.

It can be tempting to label this experience as "low self-esteem" and keep moving. Something much different is actually happening. The scapegoat child learns that their existence depends on being less powerful than the narcissistic parent. So they have to actively thwart, deny, and avoid their own power. Growing up inherently means becoming more powerful. To protect themselves, the child may develop a distrust, fear, and suspiciousness of their own power. Doing so keeps the child in relationship to the narcissistic parent in the only way that parent allows. The same dynamic shapes the family the scapegoat child grows up inside.

The narcissistic parent's need to domineer the scapegoat child

A narcissistic parent often domineers the people they have the most authority over. Children become frequent victims. To domineer is to "assert one's will over another in an arrogant way."

The narcissistic parent benefits from domineering by feeling powerful. It's an artificial and unearned sense of power, but that's of little consequence. The need to always "be on top" may reflect the parent's own core sense of powerlessness. Instead of acknowledging those feelings, they unconsciously deny them. Next, the narcissistic parent psychologically relocates them into someone else. It isn't enough to just see someone else as powerless — the parent has to influence that person to adopt the powerless feelings as their own.

A narcissistic parent easily gets the scapegoat child to identify as the powerless one. Limiting the child's freedoms in a "because I said so" kind of way leaves the child in an amoral and powerless world. The child learns that their wishes have no standing with the parent. The child's ability to do what they want rests on the whim of the parent — and the parent's whims are always at odds with the child's desire to feel in charge of themselves. The child lives in a dictatorship as a forced subject.

Ira's father treated him like he was a servant from an early age. He never asked Ira to do a task. He issued commands. "Take these trays to the trash can," he'd order Ira as they finished up their lunch at Burger King. "Set the table for dinner." "Get my shoes."

Ira recalled balking a few times when his father did this. He felt bossed around, and it was infuriating. He also knew he had to be careful of his father's temper. It wasn't OK to say "no" to this man. Ira knew he could face a wrath he wasn't prepared for. Instead, Ira would try to eke out some say in the matter by trying to do things on his timeline. He tried, "OK, give me five minutes." That wasn't enough submission for his domineering father. He barked, "What did you say? You're going to do something when I tell you to do it. Not later. NOW." Ira recalled how it was one thing to be told this and another to see the heartless contempt in his father's eyes. Ira felt an intolerable mix of rage at the injustice and shame at being so emotionally estranged from his parent. No child could navigate such feelings on their own, so he would do what was necessary to make them go away. He would do what his father ordered.

Why submission is the only option for the scapegoat child

The adult child of a narcissistic parent learned a hard lesson early — that the ability to tolerate seeming powerless was what made survival possible. The narcissistic parent threatens the child in three ways. First, the parent dictates the terms under which they will recognize the child as theirs. If the child determines they only get to be the parent's child by being powerless, then so be it. It's far better than going unrecognized by the parent. Second, the child's expressions of power can draw even more abuse from the parent. Third, the child's pain of being emotionally abandoned gets temporarily relieved by living as the parent needs them to. This is part of why so many scapegoat survivors feel like they could never win, no matter what they did.

The narcissistic parent only recognizes the scapegoat child as someone at their mercy. For the child, getting recognized by the parent is mandatory. If the child were to insist on their freedoms, they'd risk being someone the parent can't tolerate being close to. That can result in the unsurvivable state of being nobody to no one.

A narcissistic parent will enforce the scapegoat child's powerlessness via threat and coercion. The narcissistic parent can only feel powerful when the scapegoat child seems powerless. If the child doesn't go along with this, the parent is at risk of feeling their own feelings of powerlessness. That's unacceptable to a narcissistic parent. If or when the child attempts to recover their own sense of power, the parent will undermine the child all the more. Many scapegoat survivors recall the worst emotional and physical attacks happened when they questioned the parent's authority.

In the midst of all that psychological manipulation and exploitation, the child's actual self is abandoned. That's unrelentingly painful. The child learns that complying with the parent's insistence on being all-powerful yields some relief. If or when the child loses hope of the parent ever granting them a measure of respect, they can cope by living as though the parent's needs are the child's. Now if the parent seems content, the child can too. That strategy requires the child to dissociate from their own experience.

Ira recalled feeling different from his friends from an early age. He felt like he was headed somewhere dark in his future. Other boys his age seemed to revel in their newfound strengths or abilities. Ira could sit back and support those friends but couldn't feel that way about himself.

In the seventh grade, he was deathly afraid of his father finding out he was becoming interested in girls. That felt like an embarrassing secret he had to keep. He also had to make sure his father didn't know too much about certain friends. The ones who acted with freedom and liked to get into mischief appealed to Ira. But if his father knew Ira was keeping company with such free spirits, he'd make up a reason for why Ira wasn't allowed to see them.

Ira's attempts to live as an adolescent were rebuked by his father. Ira knew he faced something terrible within if he grew up. That "something terrible" was becoming someone his father wouldn't and couldn't recognize.

How a child's growth threatens their narcissistic parent

The narcissistic parent's supposed right to domineer the scapegoat child is built on flimsy evidence. Usually, it's something like "I'm the parent" — since the parent is older and grown up, they have a right to control the younger and less developed child.

That weak foundation of dominance is severely threatened by the child's increasing age and maturity. Now both parties are at risk of not recognizing each other. The child had to get used to being domineered to feel like they were somebody to someone. The parent has staved off their own powerlessness for so long in this arrangement that they can feel terrified at not being able to stow it in the child. In order to keep being someone to the parent, and to protect that parent from feeling their own powerlessness, the child can develop unconscious beliefs that find fault with how they're growing up.

Belief #1: "I don't deserve to be loved when I leave childhood"

A domineering narcissistic parent may be nurturing when the child is very young. Younger children need their parents for help more than teenagers. That dynamic may have yielded a sense of power in the narcissistic parent.

Good parents express love to teenagers in a different way than they do their young children. They offer interest, respect, support, and boundaries as needed. If the teenager feels safe enough, they may not always show much appreciation for those offerings. Good parents don't take those moments too personally and remain available to their teenager. Love is not defined as doing for the teenager — but in taking a step back and watching what the teenager can do for themselves.

That transition can be impossible for a domineering narcissistic parent. The child may pick up on this. They may blame themselves for not being able to stay the way the parent can — seemingly — love them. If the parent grows cold, indifferent, and contemptuous toward the adolescent, this belief explains why. The adolescent-then-adult can't expect anything from the parent because they're no longer loveable to that parent. The parent stays preserved as good in the person's mind.

Belief #2: "The world is dangerous and untrustworthy"

As kids grow, they become more interested in the world outside of their family. They want to establish friendships and explore activities that bring them fulfillment. Those healthy strivings would threaten the domineering narcissistic parent's fragile psychology.

The growing kid of such a parent may adopt this belief to thwart the actions that would threaten the parent. If the world is dangerous and people are untrustworthy, then why leave home? Spoiling the kid's incentive to expand their world can leave the narcissistic parent free to keep domineering. The kid is then spared the parent's attack and abandonment.

When he was fifteen, Ira felt a surge of self-loathing. He hated the way he looked. He thought he was terrible at the sports he played. He was disinterested in school. He'd work at a local coffee shop after school some days. Life felt like a slog.

Ira's home life felt like being under totalitarian rule. He relished the times before his father got home from work. Ira could lose himself in video games or movies. But when his father arrived, Ira had to be on full alert. He'd pay great attention to what his father said or found interesting. So long as he did this, his father wouldn't attack him.

No adult showed interest or concern in Ira's own life. His internal tumult was completely hidden. The presence of adults felt threatening to him. He had to make himself small to placate them and hope they would eventually leave him alone. By his senior year in high school, Ira felt behind the other kids in his grade. They had been dating, getting involved in extracurricular activities, and having adventures with each other outside of school. Ira had withdrawn socially as he knew his father wouldn't let him enjoy a rich social life. It was easier to avoid relationships his father wouldn't let him participate in.

Ira was trying to prevent that dark future of growing up from happening at this stage. He had to sacrifice an incredible amount of what he was entitled to — friendships, intimacy, prowess in activities he cared about. Those things were implicitly forbidden under his father's watch.

Recovery: Picking up the adult self from storage

The spirit of scapegoat survivors never ceases to amaze me. Despite having been met with cruelty where they hoped to find love, they maintain a drive to find and live the quality of life they deserve. Being the adult they are, and feeling deserving of love for being that person, was always the mission. It may get delayed but not denied. The full machinery of how this happened — and how to dismantle the beliefs that came with it — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

In therapeutic work with survivors, much of it centers around knowing it's safe to be the adult self. It wasn't safe to be openly mature when they were younger. Nothing can change that tragedy. What can be healed is a survivor's right to be who they are now — developmentally speaking — in their lives.

Being an adult in this sense means being entitled to the same amount of respect, goodwill, and dignity as any other adult. It also means that no adult's well-being is more important than any other's. Nor is any one adult's opinion worth more or less than any other adult's.

Finding it safe to be that kind of adult is to encounter continued care and support when being that way. The scapegoat survivor has had to learn that being fully upright is dangerous. That used to blow up the narcissistic parent's willingness to be the parent. What seemed like kindness was the parent's gratification at feeling more powerful than the child. The adult child of a narcissistic parent may gradually find it safe to expect love without sacrificing their power. With safe people, the other person really wants the survivor to feel as empowered and good about themselves as possible. Compared to what was known with the narcissistic parent, it's far more about the survivor.

A case example

Genuine concern for the survivor can feel extremely unfamiliar at first. Scapegoat survivors may even have a hard time feeling it. What has been unsatisfying and hurtful has also been the most familiar in close relationships. What feels good and satisfying is new and takes repetition to feel real. Therapy can offer that repetition. Clients get to see over time that the two beliefs they had to adopt earlier don't have to apply in this setting.

Ira came to therapy in his late twenties. He was a successful professional but felt very isolated and anxious when he wasn't at work. He could think through the problems he had to solve when working alone. In larger meetings, however, he found it difficult to hold onto his own thoughts. He felt overwhelmed, small, and resentful. As though what he had to say wasn't worthy of others' respect. In privacy, Ira had a chance of feeling like his ideas and opinions mattered. But when he had an audience, that seemed impossible. He felt like what he had to say was faulty and going to be regarded as stupid or inconsequential.

One of Ira's stated goals at the start of treatment was to have more confidence speaking up. His therapist worked to understand Ira's traumatic experiences at the hands of his father. Between that understanding and the therapist's experience of Ira in session, Ira's therapist inferred that Ira had survived his domineering father by limiting the scope of his life. The therapist suspected Ira had to believe the world was dangerous and untrustworthy, and may have come to believe he deserved rejection if he took his place as a grown-up in the world.

Treatment lasted for several years. It took time in the new therapeutic relationship for Ira to feel safe enough to begin testing those beliefs. Ira had always been interested in psychology. He was well-read on the impact of childhood maltreatment and psychological suffering. In the third year of treatment, this session occurred.

Ira told his therapist, "I was reading about trauma over the weekend and wondered something. It seems like my experience in meetings starts in my body. Like I 'know' I'm nobody to be listened to before I even think about it. This book I was reading said trauma gets stored in the body. I'm probably not analyzing it right. But I wondered what you think? I'm definitely not the expert here."

The therapist paused. A lot seemed to be going on in that moment. Ira had a good and cogent insight into his experience. But he was packaging it almost as an apology — as if he might risk offending the therapist by presuming to know more. The therapist was fairly certain that wasn't a reflection of how the therapist regarded Ira. The therapist saw Ira as a very competent, strong, dignified, compassionate, and earnest person. Maybe Ira was trying to test his belief that he deserved rejection if he took his place among grown-ups. Ira may have seen psychological insight as the therapist's sole dominion. By bringing up his own insights, Ira was presenting an opportunity to respond in a way that disconfirmed his belief.

The therapist said, "You came up with a formidable insight about your current and past experience. And I was struck by your emphasis on me being the expert here. As though your contributions to this work are less valuable. Does that resonate with you at all?"

Ira said, "Well, yeah. I actually feel this searing fear right now. Like I'm coming into your territory and trying to show you up. What right do I have to think I know something that you spend your whole career studying?"

Therapist: "Right. You have known such expressions of your own competence to be extremely dangerous in the past. What sort of reaction from me might be most harmful?"

Ira: "Well, you could think I'm some kind of jerk for trying to put you down. Then you would have to put me in my place, and that would mean a lot of humiliation for me. Plus, it would feel like our relationship is gone forever."

Therapist: "Those would be devastating consequences."

Ira: "Yeah. Well, that is what it feels like right now. But when I really think about it, I'm not trying to offend you. I'm trying to help myself here and bring in something that is important."

Therapist: "Yes, you are."

Ira: "So why should you actually try to destroy me for that? That used to happen all the time with my father. I guess there's a part of me — sure, it's small — that thinks this may not apply to you."

The therapist did not respond to him as the one with the expert opinion that was most important. The therapist inquired why Ira was diminishing the importance of his own opinion. That may have helped Ira feel safer to question the belief that he'd be rejected if he expected respect from the therapist. Those kinds of interactions would happen over and over in the course of his therapy. Over time, Ira felt safer to know and express the value of his perspective and abilities. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for the adult child of a narcissistic parent.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Do you avoid talking about yourself to people in your life?

Does showing interest in what others have to say while denying yourself the right to do the same feel like the “right” thing to do?

Does the prospect of talking about what you’re excited about or proud of in your own life feel scary?

Every conversation can feel treacherous

Those who survived narcissistic abuse in the family they grew up in can see interactions today as treacherous. The danger they “know” is that the other person may not feel sufficiently listened to, supported, and encouraged. And if they don’t, then it can seem like it’s all your fault and you have no right to be in the relationship. This risk creates an underlying anxiety that undercuts most interactions. You may never know if or when the other person will grow enraged for not being paid enough attention, but you must do everything you can to prevent it.

It’s not a job you signed up for, but it’s the one you were given long ago. The first prevention tactic is to do whatever’s in your control to keep the other person satisfied. Since you can choose whether you share what’s going on in your life, that goes on the chopping block. Why would you do something that would assuredly end in the other’s spiteful retaliation for taking up conversational airtime they’re convinced belongs to them? So you develop an internal censor to catch and deny any impulse to make the conversation about you.

This probably served you well in getting through childhood with a parent like this. The reflex to pay more attention to others than you expect in return may even feel virtuous — like an act of selflessness that reflects good moral character, not forced participation in an exploitative situation.

The cost of staying silent

But it comes with a major cost. To live in silence about yourself is painful. It reinforces the sense that there’s something bad, selfish and shameful about saying aloud what’s true for you. But more than that, it perpetuates a sense of disconnection from others.

If you can’t honestly share what matters to you for fear of punishment, then it’s also hard for them to genuinely matter to you. For someone else to matter, we have to feel they’ve given us something we need and value. When you share what’s important to you and the other person pays attention and shows respect, they’re giving you something you need in that moment — and it’s a vulnerable one. You take the risk to say “this is who I am,” and if they ignore you or react like a narcissistic parent might, you could be wounded. But when they respond with something like “I see and admire who you are,” you feel more confirmed in who you are and appreciative of what they gave you. We can’t manufacture this for ourselves — it has to come from people who practice reciprocity. Of course, it’s not what a survivor of narcissistic abuse wants — but it can just feel too dangerous to do otherwise.

In this post I’m going to explain how and why the reflex to stay silent about yourself develops in those who grew up in a narcissistic family. The good news is there’s a way to learn in your mind and body that you’re now safe to share yourself with the right people. I’ll show you a strategy that works.

My name is Jay Reid and I’m a licensed psychotherapist in California, and I specialize in helping survivors of narcissistic abuse recover the quality of life they deserve. I think of the person on the receiving end of narcissistic abuse as the “scapegoat,” because they’re blamed for shortcomings in the abuser that the abuser can’t bear to acknowledge in themselves. To survive, the scapegoated person has to live under what I call the “scapegoat spell.” It requires them to internalize two painful beliefs: 1) that there’s something fundamentally wrong with who they are (that they’re defective), and 2) that they’re less important than others (that they’re undeserving).

The 3 Pillars of Recovery

In my personal and professional experience, I’ve worked out what breaks the scapegoat spell, and it’s led me to the 3 Pillars of Recovery. Scapegoat survivors who find friendships, relationships, therapy, or group settings that let them do the following can get out from under the spell in important ways:

1) Make sense of what happened, so you know it wasn’t your fault. This means learning about narcissistic abuse to see why it casts the scapegoat spell, and talking to someone today about what it was like for you. You need to be heard, understood, and known in what it was like in your mind and body — to discover it was never your fault.

2) Gain distance from narcissistic abusers today. This means being in relationships that support your right to protect yourself from those who mistreat you — not just navigating away from such people on your own, but confiding in those you trust about what you’re seeing, so they can validate and support you.

3) Live in defiance of the narcissist’s rules. This means living contrary to the spell’s claims that you’re defective and undeserving. The trick is doing it inside a relationship today, so you can see that nothing bad happens anymore when you do. The person who matters to you supports your efforts instead of attacking or withdrawing as a narcissistic parent might have.

Only the parent’s words count

People who survived narcissistic abuse in their family typically grow up learning that it’s the narcissistic parent’s words that count — not their own. So they learn to keep quiet about themselves and instead shower attention on the parent. This is what the parent feels they’re owed by their children — part of the narcissistic sense of entitlement to be admired and treated as more important without justification.

The child likely learned the harsh lesson of what happens if they don’t make their parent the main act at all times. Stories like Sarah’s happen a lot:

At age 7, Sarah loved playing with Legos. Every day after school she worked on a Harry Potter castle she’d wanted to build for a long time. After three days she finally finished it and couldn’t wait to show her parents. Her father had just come home from work and, as always, was recounting his day to Sarah’s mother in the kitchen. Sarah burst in and exclaimed, “Mom, Dad, look what I built!” She was brimming with pride, waiting for the “ooh’s and aaah’s” she expected to hear. Her mother seemed about to offer them — until they heard a loud smack. Her father had slammed his open palm on the counter and yelled, “Damnit Sarah, can’t you see someone is talking here? You can’t just interrupt people because you feel like it. That’s so rude and selfish.” Sarah’s heart went from full to pained as tears welled up. She was frozen in shame. Instead of standing up for her, her mother scowled at Sarah too. Her father prodded her, “Well, don’t you have something to tell me?” She knew he wanted an apology, even though she had no real idea what she’d done wrong. “I’m sorry, Dad,” she muttered, and turned back to her room. From then on, she never let excitement for herself lead her into that danger again — she joined the audience her father expected rather than take center stage.

Wanting attention becomes “stealing” it

The scapegoat child internalizes the deprivation being imposed on them by the narcissistic parent. The parent isn’t paying the child the attention they deserve. But if the child insists on getting it, they’re reacted to as if they’re trying to steal the attention the parent deserves.

That’s all that’s possible to know in childhood. The child concludes that their needs for attention are hurtful to those who matter to them, and that they’re much safer giving others far more attention than they receive.

The parent’s bottomless need

The real problem is that the narcissistic parent thinks they deserve an unreasonable level of attention. They’re intent on getting it because it keeps their core sense of worthlessness at bay. When they get everyone’s attention, it helps them win the neverending argument within — that they’re not as worthless as their feelings tell them.

The same strategy now keeps you disconnected

As adults, the same strategy that kept the scapegoat child safe may keep them disconnected. It’s hard to feel like others matter when interactions feel so one-sided. What, after all, are you being given that would genuinely evoke gratitude and appreciation for the other person? Interactions have proven to be obstacle courses that can only be run by suppressing any and all information about who you are. The only prize, then, is escaping danger.

If people can’t matter for what they offer you, it’s hard to feel a need for their presence. Living without that need leads to an ongoing sense of isolation — and it can be really hard to know what to do about it.

Where to find safe people

For this to change, the adult survivor of narcissistic abuse needs to learn that people today operate differently than their narcissistic parent did. For that to happen, they need to find and participate in relationships where it’s possible to apply those 3 Pillars of Recovery.

A few sources where the odds of finding someone safe to practice these pillars are particularly high: peer support groups like ACA, psychotherapy, coaching, and facilitated support groups for scapegoat survivors. In my practice, I offer the latter three. If you’d like to learn more, I’ve put the links below — or you can go to jreidtherapy.com and find these resources yourself.

Putting the pillars into practice

When scapegoat survivors find a relationship where they can practice the 3 Pillars, they learn — in their mind and body — that living as though they’re adequate and deserving (the opposite of the scapegoat spell) brings good results in relationships today. Each pillar involves taking the risk to speak up about your own experience and seeing how the other person responds.

You might make sense of what happened (Pillar #1) by telling a friend, partner, therapist, or group member what it was like growing up in your family. As you risk being honest, you give yourself the chance to see these new people respond with compassion instead of invalidation.

You might gain distance from narcissistic abusers by telling one of those same people about someone you don’t feel good around. Where that once set you up to be scrutinized, now you may get sided with — people today may endorse your instinct to protect yourself.

And you might live in defiance of the narcissist’s rules by speaking up about what you’re happy about in your own life — maybe a work project you finished. Whatever it is, you take the risk of saying what excites you and see that now people don’t vindictively attack out of envy, but celebrate with you.

A free webinar for breaking the narcissist’s rules

If you’d like to dig into the third pillar — breaking the narcissist’s rules — I’d point you to a free webinar I created for just that purpose. It’s called Breaking the Narcissist’s 2 Biggest Rules, and it shows you how to notice and challenge the mandate to see yourself as defective and undeserving, with real, practical steps. You can find the link by clicking here.

Watch the full video of today’s post here:

Jay Reid is a licensed therapist (LPCC #4195) in private practice in California, specializing in adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic family abuse. Learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Being the scapegoat daughter to a narcissistic parent means feeling very unimportant. The scapegoat daughter may have even felt like she didn't exist to that parent. Psychologically speaking, she wouldn't be wrong.

It's very painful for a child to attach to a parent who doesn't see nor care about the child's existence. The rule is that the parent is more important than the child. Therefore the child's resulting anguish at feeling devalued and deprived is inconsequential.

In that arrangement, the child avoids experiences that reflect her importance. Such experiences contradict the narcissistic parent's rule that the child is unimportant. The child can feel worse in those moments. She has to painfully know what she's missing out on. The injustice of her arrangement and its permanence can agonize her. The same dynamic shapes the family the scapegoat child grows up inside.

One of the ways a scapegoat daughter risks feeling important is in her gifts. Everyone has gifts. Whether it's singing, writing, athletics, or connecting to others. When someone outside the family sees and celebrates the scapegoat daughter's gifts, she's in a difficult position. She needs to protect herself from the pain of knowing what she's missing. And she risks the narcissistic parent's vindictive attack if her gifts evoke that parent's envy.

So the scapegoat daughter has to deny her own gifts and learn to celebrate other people's gifts instead. Both strategies protect her. The scapegoat survivor may unconsciously continue to deny her gifts by finding relationships with other narcissists. Later, survivors can find it safe to recover their gifts in new relationships.

The dangers of the scapegoat daughter owning her gifts

There are two dangers. The first is being important when she's not supposed to be. The scapegoat daughter's gifts threaten the required arrangement with the narcissistic parent. The child is assumed to be — and treated as — less important than the narcissistic parent. The child getting recognized as special or gifted is not part of that equation.

There are two ways the narcissistic parent enforces this disparity. The parent's self-absorption deprives the child of the recognition that she matters. By extension, her gifts cannot matter. That context makes the child's recognition of her gifts feel all the more painful.

Alyssa was eight years old and trying out for her softball little league team. She remembered coming to the plate where a coach was pitching to the players. The goal was to see how well the players hit so they could be sorted onto teams. Alyssa had only played tee-ball before this and was a decent but not great hitter then.

She got to the plate. The first pitch she saw, she crushed into the opposite outfield. "What just happened?" she excitedly asked herself. The coach said, "Wow!" and said he was going to throw another. Pop — the ball rocketed off her bat into centerfield and over the outfielder's head. And so it went. She had no idea this was in her.

As tryout practice was wrapping up, her coach said, "Well, I guess we know who's going to be the #1 pick in this year's softball league draft," as he nodded to Alyssa. Alyssa was over the moon — yet felt a tinge of worry. These were unfamiliar feelings. She wasn't used to being singled out for good reasons. She was the scapegoat daughter in her family. Her father was wholly disinterested in her except when he criticized her about something. Her mother was volatile and prone to yell at Alyssa at the drop of a hat.

Alyssa looked toward the dugout and saw her father there to pick her up. The coach came over to him and said, "Your daughter is something else. She hit the ball out of the park all practice." He looked at Alyssa, and she felt intensely uncomfortable. Something was wrong.

As they walked to his car, Alyssa found herself offering herself up for his critique. "Dad, what did you think of my form when I was hitting the ball? Was it OK?" That gave her father something she unconsciously knew he required. "Well, your elbow kept sagging down. You need to make sure to keep it up." Alyssa stopped and tried to mimic the form he described. "You mean, like this?" "Yes, exactly," she said.

From that moment on, Alyssa found herself obsessing over whether she had the right batting stance. So much so that she was too preoccupied to hit the ball like she did during tryouts. To stay less important than her narcissistic father, she had to present herself as faulty to him. That let him feel superior as the one who could tell her how to fix herself.

Alyssa felt tension at being recognized for being able to hit in front of a parent who denied her importance. The gulf of how her coach responded to her versus her father's typical indifference toward her was distressing. She coped by sacrificing her gift into something that needed correction by her "all-knowing" father. She lost her right to enjoy this gift but restored the order required in her family.

One of the ways a scapegoat daughter can keep her morale up in such a dreadful situation is to tell herself that the parent will eventually recognize her importance if she follows the rule. Alyssa did this by assuming she would hit even better if she mastered her father's recommendation.

Evoking the narcissistic parent's envy

The second danger of the scapegoat daughter owning her gifts is making the narcissistic parent envious. Envy is a feeling of inadequacy due to seeing someone possess something you don't. Next is the desire to destroy that person's possession so you feel more adequate. That's a frequent experience for narcissistic people. Scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recall being punished suspiciously soon after a success. Kids who were popular at school and invited to sleep over at friends' homes would often return the next morning to a parent irate at them. The reasons could vary, but the sequence was the same. A child who announces she won a spelling contest at the dinner table might get criticized for her table manners a few moments later. The scapegoat daughter learns to associate the parent's vindictive attack with her successes. As a matter of protection, she has to deny her gifts. Sure, it's painful — but it beats being attacked all the time. This is part of why so many scapegoat survivors feel like they could never win, no matter what they did.

How the scapegoat daughter copes

Although it's too dangerous to own her gifts, the scapegoat daughter can celebrate other people's gifts. There are several benefits to this coping strategy. It often comes naturally to empathize with and promote others' gifts. When directed toward the narcissistic parent, the child can buy herself some protection. By celebrating the parent's gifts, she's seeing the parent as more important. That prevents the parent from feeling envious and attacking the child.

Celebrating others' gifts instead of one's own is often welcome by other people. It's generally a good quality to appreciate other people's gifts. A scapegoat daughter may have a generosity of spirit in this regard.

The challenge is the rule that she not accept the same appreciation in return. The scapegoat daughter is left feeling appreciated for celebrating other people's gifts while being forbidden from being celebrated. That can leave her feeling privately exploited and empty. She feels appreciated for what she gives but not for who she is. Her only reliable sense of worth becomes making others feel good about their gifts.

Why scapegoat survivors keep denying their gifts in adulthood

The child can become occupied with the fantasy of the parent's eventual change of heart. That makes the narcissistic parent's actual punishments for expressing the child's gifts something that has to be endured before the bliss of being loved. In fact, that sort of mistreatment can get associated with the supposed promise of love to follow.

In that way, the scapegoat daughter believes that things aren't what they seem. The narcissistic parent's envy, withholding, and vindictiveness is a pit stop on the way to something much better. That's necessary for the child to believe while dependent on the narcissistic parent. It would be disastrous to know that what she sees is what she gets from the narcissistic parent. The parent doesn't have a chamber inside them full of love that the child can unlock. If they did, the child would have already received it. That can only be understood and known with enough distance from the parent.

The scapegoat survivor can later feel strongly attracted to similar narcissistic people. When she finds someone who is threatened by her gifts, the survivor can associate that with the promise of love. A partner who denies her gifts is offering helpful correction. With enough self-modification, the partner may give her the acceptance she seeks. Things aren't what they seem in those relationships. The fantasy that helped the survivor survive her narcissistic parent leads her toward similar predicaments.

The path to recovering the scapegoat daughter's gifts

A scapegoat daughter needs to experience firsthand an ongoing relationship where her gifts don't threaten it. In a relationship with someone who is safe, the danger of them turning away or against her isn't present. Expression of her gifts doesn't evoke withdrawal or hostility from the other. With repetition, the association between being gifted and being endangered diminishes. The full machinery of how this happened — and how to dismantle the beliefs that came with it — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

It isn't the experience of using one's gifts that's the problem. It's the traumatic association of those gifts with the narcissistic parent's retaliation. In new relationships, the survivor experiences an entirely different calculus. She receives care and attention for being who she is, not for how she meets the other's needs.

The scapegoat survivor has to shift from valuing the promise of love to whether it's present. Instead of seeing love and acceptance as something that comes after feeling undeserving, the survivor gets to expect it now. If the survivor isn't given the acceptance she seeks, that's a signal to look elsewhere. That means taking the other person's treatment of her at face value. She gets to prize the actual presence of being treated well rather than its promise.

A common challenge in this process is feeling guilty for moving away from people who don't treat the survivor well. That can be hard to understand at face value. The scapegoat daughter had to take responsibility for the narcissistic parent's emotional well-being — that was the parent's entitled expectation. Failure to do so would result in further suffering. So the survivor's decision to move away from people who mistreat her can feel like shirking responsibility. Guilt is soon to follow. A way to challenge and move past such guilt is to recognize that the survivor is only responsible for her own emotional well-being. That's easier said than experienced. It's important to gain new experience in relationships that endorse the point. Time spent with people who prioritize their own needs means others aren't expected to. That arrangement means neither party has to abandon themselves to take care of the other. Part of caring for one's own emotional well-being can include expressing one's gifts. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for the scapegoat daughter (and son) grown up.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Children of a narcissistic father — and a narcissistic parent more broadly — are often deprived of feeling visible. A narcissistic father isn't curious about the child's inner world. He's too busy propping up his own and using others to aid that purpose. The child ends up feeling invisible to the parent.

Despite that invisibility, the child has to forge some way of relating to this parent. The child has to find a way to be somebody to the parent, even though they feel like nobody to them. That involves suppressing the pain of feeling invisible and forcing themselves to fit into the parent's world. The narcissistic father will use the child to boost his inflated yet fragile self-esteem. That can mean serving as a caricatured ally or enemy to the parent. Either role yields no genuine feeling of visibility. The same dynamic shapes the family the scapegoat child grows up inside.

Three ways a narcissistic father makes a child feel invisible

A narcissistic father believes children exist to serve his needs. He's justified — to himself — because he sees his own needs as most important. The child is left feeling invisible. It's as if the children are put on a shelf in the narcissistic father's mind, only to be taken down when it suits him. Otherwise, the child is expected to remain silent.

Way one: getting ignored

The narcissistic father may regard his ambitions as supremely important. Whatever or whoever serves to facilitate those ambitions is worth his time. Conditions or people who don't further the parent's ambitions are worthless to him. Children often fall into the latter category. They can feel like they don't matter unless they fit into the parent's sphere of self-interest.

Sandya's father was absorbed in his work. He prioritized whatever he thought would help him get ahead and saw fatherhood as a distant second. He'd arrive home just before dinnertime, then retire to his office immediately afterward to keep working. He didn't involve himself in his wife's or children's lives.

Sandya knew from a young age not to approach her narcissistic father with any emotional need. If she felt scared and cried out for him, he'd act like he didn't hear her. If she was joyous and wanted to share that with him, he'd seem preoccupied with something else.

As Sandya grew older, she realized that if she asked her father about his work, he'd pay some attention to her. She googled the name of her father's company and read up on it. She made a list of questions in her mind to ask him when he got home that night. To her surprise, he seemed happy that she was interested in his work. For the first time in her life, he didn't seem impatient in his dealings with her. He spoke to her for a full 30 minutes as she made sure to show enthusiasm and interest in what he was telling her. Sandya was inconsequential to her father until she reflected what was most important to him. She felt invisible unless she was applauding him.

Way two: shining a favorable light

The narcissistic father (or mother) may anoint a child as the supposed best. That serves the parent's needs by affording them more admiration. The child's excellence in the parent's eyes reflects more on the parent than the child. Treating a child this way reinforces the parent's fragile claim on their own superiority.

That can be very confusing for the child. Nothing they can do is seemingly wrong in the parent's eyes. Yet the parent may find everything wrong with other people in their orbit. The child knows they aren't perfect and wonders what the parent would do if they knew that. The child may feel celebrated but invisible.

Marcia was always her mother's favorite. She'd accompany her mother on shopping trips where her mother would try on different clothes and ask for Marcia's opinion. Her mother would turn to Marcia for validation after yelling at Marcia's scapegoat brother. Marcia felt very special to her mother. As she grew older, however, Marcia began to feel like she led a double life. Her friends at school started cursing and being interested in boys. She feared her mother would disown her if she knew about that side of her. All that seemed visible to her mother was Marcia's supposed perfection. Her fallibility went invisible — and so did Marcia's sense of being a real person to her mother.

Way three: throwing the scapegoat child under the bus

A narcissistic father may also only see negative qualities in a child. That serves the parent's needs by getting to feel superior by virtue of being unlike that child. The parent relocates their own sense of worthlessness into the child and then gets the child to identify with it. For that to work, the parent and child have to believe that there's nothing good about the child. That feels terrible for the child put into this role of scapegoat. They also feel invisible because it's an artificiality. The parts of them that are good — which may be substantial — cannot exist to the parent. The scapegoat child is left confused about how nothing about them seems to please their parent. They are left feeling like only their badness is visible to the parent. Their goodness feels invisible to both of them. This is part of why so many scapegoat survivors feel like they could never win, no matter what they did.

Matt was Marcia's older brother. He got the opposite treatment from their narcissistic mother. She was always harping on Matt about something. He hadn't cleaned his room like she'd asked. He was slouching. He was chewing too loudly. He was mumbling. At every turn she found fault in how he conducted himself. Seeing her treat his sister so well told Matt that his mother had the capacity to be kind — but she didn't see him as worthy.

At school, Matt was well-liked by his peers, a good athlete in sports, and got good grades. Those facts about him seemed meaningless to his mother. It was as if his good qualities were invisible to her. That made him question the value of those qualities. If his own mother didn't think they mattered, then why should he? He grew to see himself as worthless in the way she was influencing him to.

How children survive being invisible

Children are highly motivated to avoid the experience of being invisible. The cost of going unseen by their parent can feel like being nobody to no one. That's an agonizing experience the child has to avoid at all costs. If it can't be avoided, the effects have to be numbed.

Having to be who they are not

One way the child of a narcissistic father may avoid or manage feeling invisible is to constrict themselves to be who the parent sees.

Marcia grew to see herself as perfect — or having to be perfect — in the same way her mother saw her. As a result, her human fallibility felt like an unpardonable sin. If she got anything but an A on a school assignment, she'd feel a torrent of self-loathing and want to inflict pain on herself. She never shared those feelings with anyone. She was too ashamed to admit how she didn't fit into her mother's view of her.

Matt had a different problem. He couldn't see anything good about being who he was. He was only visible to his mother when he was messing up, in need of correction, or a source of irritation. His victories, attributes, and decency had no place in how she knew him. He found himself always finding a problem with everything he did. A good grade was a fluke. Friendly receptions were evidence the person didn't really know him. He gravitated toward friends and partners who saw him the way he was seen at home.

Marcia and Matt had to constrict themselves in similar ways and with grave costs. Living that way still spared them the far worse experience of feeling unknown to their parent.

Having to be a ghost

The child who goes ignored may constrict their awareness of themselves entirely. To be aware of themselves is to know and feel a tormenting problem with no solution — that they aren't somebody to their parent. So they figure out how to be a ghost to themselves.

The child can feel invisible even when in the presence of the parent. They may not be spoken to or acknowledged in any way. If the child takes offense to how little they seem to matter, they'll only suffer more. The narcissistic father may humiliate the child for not being self-sufficient or lash out at them for not reflecting back his perfect parenting.

Under such conditions, the only way to survive is to constrict awareness. The child may go off in their mind to be occupied with anything but the painful reality in front of them. They may push themselves out of their minds and seek to be the ghost they're treated as.

Sandya conditioned herself to make do with her father's inability to care about her existence. She didn't make demands on him. She did whatever she could to avoid irritating him. That meant being very careful to clean up after herself even as a young child. Otherwise, her father's ignorance of her would be interrupted by his gruff angry scolding for being so messy. It was one of the few times he reacted directly to her, and it hurt. Over time, she found that living hurt a lot less when she focused on anyone and anything other than herself.

Relationships where the survivor becomes visible

To heal from being invisible to a narcissistic father, survivors need to find and participate in relationships where they are readily visible. That isn't always easy. A survivor of a childhood of feeling invisible may not know anything different. Worse, the survivor may be conditioned to avoid visibility to others given how bad it has felt in the past. That's why the process of healing is a long one. The full machinery of how this happened — and how to dismantle the beliefs that came with it — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

The survivor is working to recover a loving and respectful relationship with all of themselves. To do that, they have to stay in connection with the parts of themselves that were invisible to the parent. That means incrementally tolerating the shame, self-loathing, and despair that used to go with visibility. In order for the work to be productive, the survivor has to do it in the context of a new safe relationship. Reinforcement from another person is needed for the survivor's attempts to be visible.

Therapy is one place where the survivor has very high odds of finding a safe relationship. That lets the survivor control for the variable of whether the other person is safe. If the survivor of invisibility doesn't feel safe or visible, there's a chance to explore what's happening. The therapist may have actually done, said, or not done something that led to that. Most therapists can earnestly and non-defensively explore the possibility. Alternatively, the survivor's feelings of danger may be holdovers from what being visible used to mean. In those cases the survivor gets to feel understood by someone else for what they used to have to endure privately. They can talk about how and what is making them feel endangered in that moment. As they're met with implicit compassion and validation, the danger lessens.

Over time — sometimes significant amounts of time — the survivor may find it appealing to be visible. The post-traumatic consequences of being invisible to the narcissistic father may have subsided. Now they welcome the opportunity to see themselves fully and be seen by certain others.

Sandya came to therapy in her mid-twenties because she felt like she was just going through the motions in her life. She fell into states of depression on the weekends when she wasn't working. She described feeling like a stranger to herself, and unable to find meaning on her own. She and her therapist would work together for several years. During that time, the therapist understood how inconsequential she felt to her father. The therapist would highlight to her how she operated from that assumption currently. The therapist would also show her, whenever possible, that she mattered as a client. So Sandya found insight into the way her father's self-absorption impacted her. She also received current information in the therapeutic relationship that contradicted her conclusion that she didn't matter to others. Those two factors worked in tandem over the years to restore her sense of her own visibility to others and herself. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for adult children of a narcissistic father (or mother) specifically.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

It’s as if they’re suddenly on trial in a courtroom that’s rigged against them. They can feel the charges hanging in the air before anyone says a word. And just like that, their body enters its plea: guilty. Not because there’s evidence. But because pleading guilty is the only thing that seems possible.

And when the room seems to confirm that they’re lesser, wrong, or slightly ridiculous, that verdict feels correct. Maybe not comfortable or welcome, but correct.

Now flip the scene. Someone who knows the scapegoat survivor well today looks them in the eye and says something genuinely accurate — that they handled something with real skill, that their read on a situation was right, or that they’re more capable than they let on.

What happens in the scapegoat survivor’s body? Something tightens. The words don’t seem like they apply to someone far away. A part of them immediately begins looking for the flaw in what was just said. Maybe this person is just being nice. Maybe they don’t really know you. Maybe they’ll change their mind later. You can’t welcome the recognition.

The scapegoat survivor has to trust the verdict that convicts them. And they must distrust the one that acquits. The former is much more familiar to them. The verdicts that say they’re a good person, trustworthy, appreciated and admired are far less familiar. An occasional instance of this kind of reception will just seem like an anomaly that needs to be explained away.

My name is Jay Reid, and I’m a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping scapegoat survivors of narcissistic families reclaim their real, formidable selves.

What I’m going to describe here is an adaptation that once kept the scapegoat child attached to the very people who were issuing these damning verdicts. The child did what they absolutely had to do. It’s that adaptation that keeps them standing trial in their inner worlds today. Then I’ll explain what’s needed to finally exit this inner courtroom.

The Kangaroo Court in the Narcissistic Family

The judgments and accusations the scapegoat child faces from their narcissistic parent resemble a kangaroo court. Such courts have all the trappings of a real trial — a judge, a jury, and a verdict — but where the outcome was already decided by the powers that be. The whole thing is theater designed to make a predetermined conclusion look like justice.

A narcissistic parent’s self-interest lies in the scapegoat child being found guilty for the flaws the parent sees and fears in themselves. When the child is found guilty instead of the parent, the latter feels protected from what they can’t stand in themselves.

When Brett was 4 years old his narcissistic mother asked if he had brushed his teeth before bedtime. Brett knew that he had. But when he answered yes he was shocked when his mother recoiled and said with astonishment, “Oh, Brett! You just lied to me. How could you do that?” Brett was so confused and beginning to feel angry and scared. His mother turned to his father who was under her thumb and said, “Your son is lying to us.” Brett’s father knew what he had to do to please his wife so he grabbed his son by the arm, spun him around, and spanked him three times. All this time, Brett was pleading with her to listen to him. That he had brushed his teeth and that he didn’t know why she was accusing him of lying. To all of this she just said, “And look how he’s trying to convince us of this lie!”.

Brett went from thinking he lived in a home ruled by justice to understanding in his bones that he was somewhere very different. He learned that whenever his mother accused him of something he was guilty until proven innocent. And he could never prove this with her. He was in his mother’s kangaroo court.

The Scapegoat Child’s Predicament

The scapegoat child faces a brutal fork in the road:

Option A: Defend their innocence and go psychologically off the map. They must be found guilty so refusing to go along with this means being someone their narcissistic parent will not psychologically recognize. The child ends up feeling like nobody to no one.

Option B: Identify as the guilty party — stay the smaller, dependent, less capable version — and at least feel like “someone” to “somebody.” Albeit an inferior someone to a supposedly superior somebody.

It’s not an actual choice. Survival demands Option B.

This means that the child must deny any development in themselves that threatens their ability to plead guilty of their narcissistic parent’s accusations. To do this, the child unconsciously adopts the beliefs that there’s something wrong with them and that they’re less important than others. These beliefs allow the child to conform to the role thrust upon them.

If there’s always something wrong with them then they can’t see and appreciate their own growth. Nor can they recognize their increasing capabilities and power as a person.

How the Kangaroo Court Deprives the Scapegoat Child

Two vital experiences were missing for the scapegoat child: being loved for who they uniquely are, and having the love they offer be cherished by their parent.

There’s never a moment in the kangaroo court where the press to accuse the child relents enough to witness and regard the child’s value. Life in the family is about conflict and the scapegoat child is always the adversary. Adversaries don’t have the experience of being loved nor valued for the love they have to offer.

When the child doesn’t get these two essential experiences from the only person – at the time of life – who can offer them, they have to make do with what is being offered. This is the identity as the guilty adversary who must accept the court’s verdicts and sentencing at all times.

Adult Life in the Kangaroo Court

Fast forward to adulthood. The narcissistic parent might be far away or even gone. But the kangaroo court still runs.

Adult scapegoat survivors may not be able to think of themselves without immediately finding some sort of fault. Reflecting on a meeting at work yesterday can make them immediately cringe at what they said when they spoke up. Or thinking back on a text exchange can bring the verdict of being “too wordy” or maybe “too eager”. It’s much harder to presume their innocence than find reasons for such guilt.

This can leave the adult scapegoat survivor feeling like:

• Other people are the “real adults.”

• They’re the one who “doesn’t know enough.”

• Their own ideas and judgments always point in the wrong direction and shouldn’t be trusted.

• They feel mandated to deny or minimize their successes.

• They feel drawn towards the familiarity offered by friends and partners who hold their own kangaroo courts and need the scapegoat survivor to play the role they’ve always known.

How to Start Overturning the Court’s Verdicts

Although the narcissistic family’s kangaroo court ran on distortions, they happened so early and often in the scapegoat child’s life that they felt like facts. As we saw in the example of Brett earlier, arguing against these verdicts within the kangaroo courtroom does no good. For metaphor’s sake, what’s needed is to exit the courtroom entirely. The scapegoat survivor needs new interactions in relationships where nobody is on trial and the equation for harmony comes at no one’s expense.

In order for this to happen, a scapegoat survivor needs to find people who are well-adjusted within themselves. With such people the scapegoat survivor can unconsciously test out whether they have to occupy the position of the guilty one for this relationship to work. The survivor might share something about themselves to see how this person reacts. Do they find fault, or maybe show curiosity and appreciation? Do they listen as intently as they expect the survivor to listen to them?

When scapegoat survivors find such expectation-violating responses from someone important in their lives today they gain evidence it’s now safer to live without reference to the old kangaroo court. These relationships don’t depend on the survivor pleading guilty. As such, the survivor gets to find new ways to feel real in relation to someone else. Maybe sharing what they like about themselves becomes currency. Or celebrating successes at work or home.

I call this process relational disconfirmation. It amounts to experiences where someone important to them responds in ways that disconfirm the painful assumptions that the scapegoat survivor is defective and undeserving. After an upbringing in the kangaroo court it often takes significant time for this process to unfold enough for the scapegoat survivor to experience the kinds of outcomes I just described.

How Brett Began Getting a Fair Trial

Let’s illustrate this process by following Brett into adulthood.

By the time Brett got to college, the verdict from the kangaroo court was old and well-rehearsed. He’d had to labor under the beliefs that he was defective and undeserving so the court seemed to run inside him. Anytime he tried to embody what might be good about him he felt like a fraud. For example, he was drawn towards rough-and-tumble sports like football and martial arts. But whenever he practiced either he accused himself of being a “fake tough guy”. This limited his ability to succeed in these endeavors. Outcomes that the inner kangaroo court would run with and use as further evidence against him.

This began to shift when Brett went to college hours away from home. He found it a little more possible to experiment with being someone other than the guilty one. At his martial arts class another student had paid him a compliment about his technique and he didn’t immediately dismiss it.

Another important frontier for Brett’s process of recovery was how he felt allowed to present himself to the world. Since entering adolescence he’d had to extend his fault-finding reflex to his appearance. There was always going to be something wrong with how he appeared, it was just a matter of what. He’d see himself as too fat or too ugly, etc. This wasn’t how his friends and peers seemed to see him but it’s what felt most true to him.

In his sophomore year, he orchestrated a test of whether he had to keep this part of the courtroom going or not.

He had always liked the idea of dressing in a way that showed some effort. So he bought a couple of pieces of clothing that he genuinely liked. The next morning, he put it all on, spent an extra few minutes in front of the mirror combing his hair, and walked to class.

On the way there, his body reacted like he was doing something illegal. His heart pounded and his skin buzzed with shame. His mind supplied the old prosecution’s closing argument: “Who does he think he is? He’s pretending to be somebody he’s not. Everyone’s going to see right through him.”

He got to class and sat down next to his friend, Mark, whom he usually sat with. His friend looked over and said, simply: “Brett — you look great, man. That jacket’s sharp.”

In that moment, Brett had two verdicts in front of him: the internal kangaroo court from his mother, hissing that he was ridiculous and should be ashamed, and the real-time testimony of a friend who saw him as put-together, worth noticing, and worthy of a compliment. For the first time it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that he was going to go with his mother’s verdict against him. Mark’s carried some weight this time.

Over the next semester, Mark kept offering Brett different testimony about who he was: clearly enjoying Brett’s presence, listening earnestly when Brett told him something, and readily seeing and praising Brett’s shows of prowess in life.

This repeated reception from Mark served to relationally disconfirm Brett’s beliefs that there was something wrong with him and that his needs were less important than others. That wasn’t how Mark saw and treated him. With the distance from his mother and her kangaroo court, Mark’s messages stuck a lot more than before.

A Free Webinar: How to Defy the Narcissist’s 2 Biggest Rules

The kangaroo court convicts the scapegoat child on two charges: that they’re defective and that they’re undeserving. Those are the narcissist’s two biggest rules. Follow them and the verdict of worthlessness stands. Defy them and the court loses its power.

I’ve created a free webinar called How to Defy the Narcissist’s 2 Biggest Rules that shows you how to break them. You’ll come away with four steps you can take to immediately improve your quality of life.

In the webinar, I explain the maneuver a narcissistic parent uses to make their child carry the parent’s own worthlessness, and why pleading guilty felt safer than the catastrophic aloneness of refusing. Then I walk you through the Three Pillars of Recovery that make defiance possible today: making sense of what happened, gaining distance from narcissistic abusers, and living in defiance of the narcissist’s rules.

Most of our time goes to that third pillar. You’ll learn how to catch the rules of defectiveness and undeservingness as they operate in your life, defy them, and tolerate the old fear of abandonment long enough to take in that nobody’s leaving. You’ll also get a companion exercise to record each act of defiance and the fears it stirs up, so you can watch the evidence build that asserting your worth no longer costs you everyone.

Registration is free — the link is below. I’ll see you there.

Watch the full video here:

Jay Reid is a licensed therapist (LPCC #4195) in private practice in California, specializing in adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic family abuse. Learn more at jreidtherapy.com.

Scapegoat children of narcissistic parents are familiar with these. They get used to being known as someone defective and undeserving. The scapegoat child gets devalued, deprived, and controlled by the narcissistic mother. The net impact is to prevent the child from growing and developing.

How a narcissistic mother exploits her children

In a family headed by a narcissistic mother, the children get exploited. Some, like the golden child, are used to promote the parent's inflated self-worth — the parent's logic goes, "I am superior because my child reflects who I am." Others, like the scapegoat child, are used to absorb that parent's self-hatred — the parent's logic goes, "I am superior because my child does not reflect who I am." This is the same machinery that produces the family the scapegoat child grows up inside.

The narcissistic mother pressures the scapegoat child and the golden child to agree with the treatment they receive. A golden child has to participate in a mutual admiration society with the parent — or else.

Marcia always thought she was the apple of her mother's eye. Her mother would take her shopping every weekend. They'd try on clothes together and get ice cream. Upon arriving home, her mother would invariably find a reason to yell at her older brother Matt. For instance, she might claim he'd left something out in the kitchen and that meant he didn't respect her. She'd say he was irresponsible and selfish and send him to his room as punishment. Marcia would "check out" in those moments. She didn't like seeing her brother treated this way. He seemed to be a good person. She felt something very strong pulling her to agree with her mother. She knew something would tear the fabric of the family apart if she didn't go along.

Marcia felt extreme — yet subtle — pressure to agree with her mother's perspective. In retrospect, it was the only reality her mother offered her. Marcia and her mother were the special people, and Matt was the lowly "bad" child. To question that arrangement would be to occupy a different reality than her mother's. That would have been too psychologically dangerous for any child to do.

The scapegoat child also has to conform to the narcissistic mother's reality. This child embodies the narcissistic mother's intolerable feelings of inadequacy. The mother projects those feelings onto the scapegoat child, then influences the child to experience them as their own. The child feels like the worthless one because there's no other way to be in the parent's reality. The consequences for the scapegoat child's development can be severe.

Way one: deprivation of emotional nourishment

To grow, all children need to feel encouraged and attended to by their parent. That responsiveness lets the child know they continue to exist when they show their increasing capabilities. Children with "good-enough" parents feel a sense of continuity with themselves as they grow. They get to enjoy the feelings of power that come along with growth without sacrificing connection to important others.

The scapegoat child to a narcissistic mother finds nobody around when they seek recognition and affirmation for their growth. Without those responses, the child doesn't have the necessary support needed to grow. Instead of getting to enjoy their development, the scapegoat child feels lonelier and more unloved.

A prominent psychoanalyst named James Masterson called this the "abandonment depression." He described how children of narcissistic parents can feel worse when they demonstrate their capabilities. They were painfully deprived of the parental responsiveness needed to support their growth. As a result, expressions of competence by a scapegoat survivor as an adult can feel similarly painful.

Donald was born to a narcissistic mother and a passive father. He came to therapy in his mid-20s to address anxiety and feelings of emptiness. Donald presented as an athletic, well-kempt, intelligent, articulate, and professionally successful young man. As therapy proceeded, Donald confessed to his therapist that he didn't feel like he owned any of those personal qualities.

As a child, Donald had to orbit his mother, who was prone to violent rages if she didn't feel obeyed and admired at all times. He had no recollection of getting to occupy the center of the family's attention in his childhood — at least not in a positive way. As a result, he kept his growth as a person a secret to himself and to his family. For example, neither parent asked him about romantic partners or acknowledged that as a teenager he'd appropriately be looking to date. Without anyone noticing and encouraging Donald's development, he didn't have a way to identify with himself. Instead, he had to identify with his mother's imposed identity as the defective and undeserving family scapegoat. All of that led to him being struck by feelings of panic when a woman showed interest in him. Although he knew he wanted that attention in theory, in practice it made him feel endangered — and he didn't know why.

Donald's case demonstrates the abandonment depression he'd experience when he tried to take ownership of qualities as a person. He coped by feeling dissociated from himself and seeing his abilities as fraudulent. That can be a consequence of the emotional deprivation faced by the scapegoat child of a narcissistic mother.

Way two: devaluation of the scapegoat child

The narcissistic mother perceives and treats the scapegoat child as worth less than everyone else in the family. The child has to believe in their devalued status to share a reality with the family. The arrangement lets the parent feel better than the child by comparison. The child may cope with the devaluation by adopting the unconscious belief they are defective. If the scapegoat child is defective, then what's the point of growing? Becoming an even bigger defect? That's one of the tragic consequences for the scapegoat child. This is part of why so many scapegoat survivors feel like they could never win, no matter what they did.

Steve was the scapegoat to his narcissistic father. At home, he could never do anything right. If Steve folded his clothes and put them in his dresser, his father would storm into his room, accuse him of shoddy work, and dump the clothes on the floor for him to re-fold. Such occurrences were common and led Steve to conclude he was defective. As he grew up, he found other ways to convince himself of his defectiveness. He believed himself to be unathletic despite playing several sports. He thought he was going to fail the next assignment in his advanced classes despite having good grades. He couldn't think of himself without simultaneously thinking of something that was — supposedly — wrong with him.

Steve couldn't know himself in any way that was positive. To do so would have been to defy his father's narrative. As poorly as his father would treat him, Steve felt something much worse would be in store if he saw himself as having worth. Doing so would have prevented his father from using him to embody the parent's own worthlessness. He knew deep down that his father would never stand for that and would likely attack Steve even more. That was the "something worse" he feared.

Way three: control of the scapegoat child's relationships

The scapegoat child's valued relationships threaten the narcissistic mother. If the child finds friendships and relationships they value — and with whom they feel valued — they may question the parent's devaluation. The child can absorb the parent's cast-off feelings of inadequacy only to the extent they feel deserving of them. So a child's good relationships are often a threat to the narcissistic mother.

Such parents will seek and try to destroy the scapegoat child's valued relationships. The parent may use punishments to prevent the scapegoat child from participating in friendships. Similarly, romantic relationships may be undermined by the narcissistic mother. To cope, the scapegoat child may have to sever connections to people they care about. That strategy spares the child the pain of having the parent take those relationships away. But it costs the child the kinds of relationships needed to counter the parent's devaluation — which is exactly why the narcissistic mother seeks to take them away.

Matt recalled a moment he lost a potential friendship because of his mother. As a sophomore in high school, he worked at a car wash with a friend named Rick, who was a senior. One day after their shift, Rick asked Matt if he wanted to come watch the Detroit Lions game at his house on Sunday. Matt felt a surge of good feeling. Rick had never asked him to hang out socially. He was an older kid, too. This must mean he thinks I'm cool, Matt thought. Matt said he'd be there.

As Matt pedaled his bike home, he grew extremely nervous about telling his mother his plans. He feared she wouldn't let him go. Tragically, he was right. He told her about Rick's invitation and she said, "Oh, you're not going. They're going to be drinking beer there. It's no place for a 10th grader." Matt wasn't sure where she drew her conclusions, but there was no speaking back to her.

Matt had to make up an excuse to Rick the next day for why he couldn't go. He was too embarrassed to say his mother wouldn't let him. Rick said, "Ah, next time." Matt found himself hoping he wouldn't ask again, so Matt wouldn't have to make up another excuse. He knew his mother would never let him go. Matt began subtly distancing himself from Rick at their job. Over time they drifted apart.

Matt's narcissistic mother thwarted his attempts to find sources of happiness outside the family. That left Matt feeling trapped. Psychologically speaking, he was chained to his family's home.

How a scapegoat survivor resumes growth

The three pillars of recovery all point to this question. By making sense of what happened so the survivor knows it wasn't their fault, they can realize how the past "facts" were false. They didn't deserve to be devalued, deprived, nor controlled by the narcissistic mother. The full machinery of how this happened — and how to dismantle the beliefs that came with it — is what the Scapegoat Spell Recovery System walks survivors through, step by step.

By gaining distance from the narcissistic abuser, the survivor's nervous system gets more and more information that they're now safe. That safety can make it easier to get closer to people who are safe. Closer connections to safe people will allow the survivor to know their own growth won't compromise these relationships.

By living in defiance of the narcissist's rules for living, the survivor is engaging in bold acts of growth. Maybe they take up a sport they gave up in adolescence and take note of their abilities in it. Maybe they join a choir to resume a singing talent they had to hide from the narcissistic mother. Maybe they invite friends and partners to a performance. Those people get to cheer them on as the survivor displays their true developed self. All of that is in defiance of the narcissist's rules and promotes the survivor's conclusion that they will not be deprived, devalued, nor controlled when they move forward. For survivors who want to do this work alongside others who get it, the Breaking the Scapegoat Spell online group class is an 8-week structured class with partner exercises designed for adult children of a narcissistic mother specifically.

Jay Reid is a licensed psychotherapist in California who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life they deserve. You can learn more at jreidtherapy.com.