"What about the good times?"

Family scapegoats, did anyone ever ask you this? Of course they did

I have finished my manuscript about the value of learning about ancestry to gain insight into family scapegoating abuse…and want to preface what I share here with the note that life after healing—and even partial healing—is life with laughter, goofiness, joy, romantic love, achievement, collegiality. The good stuff of being human. But when I talk about my experience as scapegoat, too often I get the “What about the good times?” question in one form or another. It comes from disbelief about the depth destruction wrought in a family that scapegoats a child, particularly given how good everything can appear from the outside.

That disbelief carries the sting of betrayal trauma. I often find I don’t know how to respond. It’s as if I grew up on the moon. My shame kicks in.

Here are some excerpts from the manuscript that address this thinking—that there had to be something good.

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Surely there were good times!

The premise built into the question is that all members have the same experience of family. The same happiness at the birthday party, same fun swimming, same anticipation at Christmas, same comfort being tucked in.

But the question’s premise is false.

The scapegoat is the system’s bullseye. Her experience is fundamentally at odds with those who unify behind the power holder. The other children are traumatized but not exiled because they belong. No matter that they are gang members whose safety hinges on bullying. Anything is preferable to exile because they know it is spiritual death, which they cannot help but see in the scapegoat’s eyes, and it terrifies them.

The scapegoat is never not terrified or lonely. Even at a happy event, she is watching. Waiting for someone to slap, insult, demean, or diminish her or say that she transgressed. She lives both in and outside of herself, disembodied, split.

It’s unsurprising that, for most of my life, I had the odd sensation of watching myself in a movie. This kind of chronic, low-grade dissociation helped to keep me safe, scanning for behaviors in myself that made me vulnerable to attack. This is how the scapegoat becomes the fractured, broken self that the power holder—in my case, my mother—said is constitutionally defective.

In answer to that question about fully happy memories: I have none, save the hours I spent roaming alone, in the woods. My childhood is the color of wash-water for a child’s paintbrush.

Being the scapegoat dirties everything.

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This is why we don’t tell people. They don’t get it.

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Our psychic and emotional inheritance is meant to be belonging, identity, trust, and empathy. Banding together as success stories—having high-end cars and million-dollar homes are my family’s signifiers—give the non-scapegoat children a common reference point. For the scapegoat herself, however, the inheritance is loneliness, alienation, unbelonging, and most critically, shame. I don’t share the reference point of wealth or status that my sisters so crave, though I am the best educated and successful in ways they are not; for example, as a published writer. I often wonder what I could have been, had I not spent years of my life in the fog of dissociation or the rigors of psychotherapy. The same imagination that makes scapegoating bearable in childhood is a liability in adulthood. One cannot entertain possible futures while bearing such a heavy load of toxicity.

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I have given myself permission to say, “I cannot remember any good times. I was scared all the time. I was lonely, all the time. I felt disconnected, all the time.”

This is my truth.

Telling the story to those who believe reintegrates me back into being human. So do small interactions with strangers. Smiling at a child. Asking a cashier, “How are you today?” or the letter carrier, “Are you holding up in this heat?” Small but critical ways I get unstuck and remember: My story is my story only in the closed system of the family. I can tell a different story to myself when I connect with others.

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If it hasn’t yet dawned, the family story is the community story is the national story. All of them are the basis for wars and genocides. The brilliant scholar Edward Said said, “Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.”^[1] This is why healing exile’s scars must also cross temporal, geographic, and spiritual borders. Attending to ancestry is not therapy; it is time-travel in service to the reverential restoration of what intergenerational trauma steals: one’s rightful place in a lineage and an inheritance of love and identity.

In short, belongingness.

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We cannot become aware of our scapegoat status and work toward healing, then neglect the ways this dynamic serves to oppress others. The gift of healing is that we gain greater compassion for our fellow human beings. Remember that in the journey: What carves you out with grief and suffering can make a bigger space for empathy, laughter, goofiness, joy, romantic love, achievement, collegiality.

The good stuff of being human.

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^[1] Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Granta 13, 1994

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