Found a book that I need to read: Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts)
From the reviews:
As long as women especially are scapegoated within dysfunctional families and collective circles, the universal insights and examples from Jungian Perera’s own practice will never go out of style.
I had no idea there was so much fall-out to being ‘a family scapegoat’ as i would not look at how it affected my life, and have always pushed it under the rug as i was not important enough to matter. Another guilty scapegoat trait, not important enough to face the reality of what was done to me and to actually matter enough to heal and reach for a better life. Now i see, by reading this, the myriad ways this complex affects a person, and i see myself on every page. [Hell, I am seeing myself in the reviews.]
I picked this book up because I needed to do some research on archetypes that come out of narcissistic families. Wow, did I find the right book for that. It was written in 1986, but rings true now as much as it did then. It is painfully accurate on the psychological makeup of those who suffer from being scapegoated.
We scapegoats can recount the most shocking details of our lives that horrify others while not being emotionally connected to our tales and then being surprised that others are horrified when we speak our stories… Those messengers of the shoulds and musts can still make me uncomfortable at times, awakening old feelings of not belonging and yearnings to belong and be normal like everybody else… seeing the complexity of being a scapegoat and that one does not have to be crushed by the burden we have carried.
The practice of Scapegoating, or sacrificing a being as a symbol of casting out sin, has not been left behind. Rather it has evolved along with our species into a more sophisticated, less conspicuous, perhaps far more dangerous practice. Rather than carrying out acknowledged rituals among and for the public, we have begun subconsciously attaching our shadows to those we then hold far from us, thus cleansing ourselves of the sin. We may worship different gods these days, and in some different ways, but the act of ridding is still alive and still hurts many of those among us... At the heart of the solution, as with all therapy, is understanding. Of course with scapegoating, this solution is particularly challenging, and important, because the entire point of scapegoating is the refusal to understand – to in a way, attach the painful side of truth to a person or being other than oneself rather than to try to understand the truth at all.
There are several ways of treating anomalies. Negatively we can ignore, just not perceive, or perceiving we can condemn. Positively we can deliberately confront the anomaly and try to create a new pattern of reality in which it has a place.