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So, one topic that presents challenges for scapegoats is trust. When we’re treated as a scapegoat and/or abused by narcissists, whether it’s in a family or other relationship, it damages our ability to trust others. Here we are being treated unfairly by someone who’s supposed to love and care about us, but they use us as a patsy for their own behaviour. And they criticize, berate, and lie about us all for their own interests. Sometimes physical or other abuse is involved. There’s no loyalty coming from them to us. None. If it’s a parent, we may believe that their actions toward us are somehow justified. I mean, this is our parent. A supposed role model. Someone we should be able to trust and lean on. Someone who demands to be seen as wise and all-knowing. And yet the person they portray us to be is not anything like who we feel we are. That creates a great deal of dissonance. Then, because we’ve been taught to respect this person and “do as we’re told”, we feel guilty for even questioning them in our minds. And they will be quite willing to pile more guilt on just to keep us held down. Their behaviour towards us – control, manipulation, gaslighting, projecting, etc. – is all meant to keep us in line and under their thumb. They may try to mask it as concern, love, discipline, or whatever else, but it’s all about keeping us firmly entrenched in our scapegoat role.
If we go on to other relationships with narcissists (which is quite common because it’s familiar), this cycle will continue. Abuse, blame, guilt. At some point, it’s only human to want to stop trusting people, unless we’re fortunate enough to have people in our lives who happen to be the real deal and wouldn’t hurt us for all the money in the world. There’s only so much our psyches can take before we need to protect ourselves. That’s perfectly normal. Upsetting, but normal.
How do we learn to trust people? One big piece of advice is to take your time when we’re getting to know new people. And when it comes to people who have proved to us over and over that they can’t be trusted, but they’re suddenly saying they’ve ‘changed’, we need to keep their past behaviour in mind before we let down our guard. There truly are good people out there in the world. We just need to listen to our intuition and past experience. We need to trust ourselves and our ability to make good judgments. And if red flags turn up along the way, we have every right to remove ourselves from whatever the situation may be. Don’t worry about hurt feelings or someone getting peeved. We need to take care of ourselves, and that includes protection from people who we feel may hurt us.
In childhood, we don’t often have protection from a narcissistic parent. Family members and other relatives tend to go along with the narrative. But we may luck out and have at least one family member who’s in our corner for support, even if they do so out of sight of the narcissist. If not, we may have friends we can turn to for support. In other relationships, we may believe that the ‘love’ we were given by a narcissist is what love should look like. As a result, we may inadvertently end up with more narcissists. And that’s okay. We all learn as we go. Once we recognize toxic people, abuse, cycles, patterns, scapegoating, and so on, we can forgive ourselves for not recognizing it because it was all we knew and what we thought was ‘normal’. And then we can do our best to keep ourselves safe from that point forward. We may at some point be tricked by another toxic person, even when we thought we had a handle on knowing what to look for. That’s okay. We forgive ourselves again and we move on. We save our trust for people who deserve it.
Yes, being a scapegoat is a difficult experience. Look at it this way, though – imagine being a narcissist or other toxic, miserable type of person. Having to control and manipulate others just to feel some sense of security. Protecting a fragile ego at all costs. Hurting people over and over again. No, thanks! Even though they hurt us, at least we can learn, grow, and become stronger, kinder people. They also provide us with a spectacular model of who we don’t ever want to be. They’re absolutely stuck where they are. Very few toxic people ever change. We have so many opportunities for changing and adapting. That’s such a gift.
Until next time,
Heather ~Natural Clarity Coaching~ naturalclaritycoaching.com na********************@***il.com Natural Clarity Coaching on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Twitter
