Category: Scapegoating

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Family Estrangement

I’ve been coming across lots of pertinent things lately.  These are some interesting notes from this article that a friend sent to me about family estrangement.

“For me, as for most people, it took an exchange so toxic, so far outside the boundaries of what’s acceptable, that something snapped inside me.

“…my only regret is that I didn’t do it earlier. Much, much earlier.

“The cultural narrative around estrangement is that it’s a problem that needs to be solved. We see and feel the supremacy of the genetically connected family in a thousand ways throughout childhood. By the time we’re adults it literally goes without saying…

“For us, estrangement isn’t a problem; it’s a solution to a problem, a response to an otherwise unsolvable dilemma. It’s a last resort when you’ve tried everything else over and over, when you no longer trust the relationship. When — as Ann Landers once wrote — you’re better off without the other person in your life.

“I’ve interviewed more than 50 people who have estranged themselves from family members, and I have yet to meet a single one who regrets it. They regret whatever situation made it necessary. They regret not having a parent/sibling/family member they could come to terms with. They regret that their problems were severe enough to make estrangement look good. But they don’t regret doing it.

“More than three-quarters of the participants in one study felt estrangement had made a positive difference in their lives. One woman I talked to who initiated an estrangement said her main feeling was relief, even liberation. Another told me it was as though she’d lived under a cloak of silence that had suddenly been lifted. A third said, “There really are cases where estrangement is the better course. It’s horrific, it’s sad, it’s tragic, and it’s better than the alternative.”

“It’s also a lot more common than you might think…The most recent research suggests that up to 10 percent of mothers are estranged from at least one adult child…

Fascinating side notes from this paper: some suggestion that the lack of a loving relationship between my mother and me was far outside the norm, and probably caused or at least exacerbated by factors outside my control.

  • the mother–daughter tie has generally been found to be the closest, most enduring, and mutually supportive of all parent–child gender combinations.
  • mothers report being most emotionally close to last-born children.
  • parent–child relations tend to be more stable when both parents are present
  • maternal depression has been shown to interfere with parent–child relationships
  • mothers who have a larger number of children may be more likely to have an estranged child simply because the risk of having a child become estranged is greater as the size of the group increases.

“…and that about 40 percent of people experience family estrangement at some point. Most people, though, fall somewhere less definitive on the estrangement continuum, a term coined by Scharp, one of the few researchers who studies the phenomenon…“I find that people are just more or less estranged.”

Some families talk by phone but never visit. Some email but never talk. Some see each other once or twice a year but keep their relationships superficial. Many sustain long periods of silence punctuated by brief reconciliations.

In my case, what I did was put words to a situation that already existed, and eventually I escalated and formalized the estrangement when they refused to deal with it or even admit it.

I forced them to make a choice, and admit to an unpleasant reality:
Prove to me that I’m really a member of this family. Listen to me and defend me against this unacceptable behavior — the way you defend everyone else who’s really included in this group — or not.

Clearly, they chose not to.

They literally could not do otherwise.  They could not show me respect, love, or support against an in-law’s disrespectful behavior, and then a brother’s.
Not even the level you might extend to a stranger.  To them, I am less worthy of those things than a stranger.

It was far easier to judge me, instead of judging one of their own.
Instead they chose to scapegoat me again, to say it was my fault for putting the choice out there — when it was the actions of others against me that brought it out in the open — and then my fault for no longer accepting my scapegoat role.

What makes my situation different from those described here, though, is that I didn’t choose the estrangement.  I was estranged by them from the very beginning.  Thus the difficulty I had, the pain and the loss I dealt with, in grappling with the fact that I wasn’t a “member of the tribe”, and never had been.

What I am guilty of is wanting a family, wanting my birthright — when that “family” made it clear so many times and so many little ways over so many years, such that when the big thing happened, I was supposed to have known better than to even ask.

“In my experience, estrangement makes people deeply uncomfortable. They wonder what’s wrong with you when you can’t get along with your family. They worry that if you can estrange yourself, maybe their parents/children/siblings could do that to them. Estrangement seems to threaten the primal order of things and opens the door to a lot of questions most of us would rather not think about…

“Imagine for a moment that these people have good reasons” to be estranged, says Scharp.”

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There’s a Name for It, Again — The IP

Notes from here.

[side note, if anyone from my FOO clicks on that link, I would bet a substantial amount of money that what they will take away from it is that my husband and I must be in couples therapy, and a self-satisfied confirmation that I’m obviously a mental wreck and our marriage is in trouble.]

“When I used to treat children and adolescents, I’d typically get a call from the parents explaining why they wanted their child to see me… the parents would be concerned, and would want to get their child help.

“Sometimes, though, it wasn’t just the child who needed help — it was the family. The child had simply become what therapists call “the identified patient,” or IP — the person unconsciously assigned to be the keeper of the family’s troubles. The IP looks like the one with the problem, but really she’s the healthiest one in the household, because in her own way, through her symptoms, she’s acknowledging the family’s issues. Instead of denying them or scapegoating others, she’s calling them out. Continue reading “There’s a Name for It, Again — The IP”

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Who’s the real victim?

Notes from here:

“In my own writings about the abuse I’ve experienced… I go into a lot of detail, get angry, and do a lot of research into such things as abuse and personality disorders… I pour everything in, all the details I can think of, along with trying to figure out what drives a person to act like that, quotes from my research which describe common abusive behaviors… what is abuse and what is normal.

“I have a strong will and don’t just figure I deserved what I got; I get very angry… I hope that these comments/blogs are not saying that if you’re angry, if you’ve done a lot of research into personality disorders and do know family history and have good reason to think disorders are at play, that it automatically labels you as the abuser playing the victim. In my case, the anger is part of the detachment/healing process and a natural response to being abused, and learning about personality disorders has reassured me that I did not deserve what I got.“

When a person says “I’ve been abused, and I’m angry about having been abused!” that is not necessarily a sign that they are falsely playing the victim… anger is part of the detachment/healing process… It shows the victim is making an excellent recovery, in my opinion. Continue reading “Who’s the real victim?”

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Three Strikes

“…I talk a lot about fighting back in The Asshole Survival Guide. There are three factors that especially predict how successful you will be at stopping or bringing down a bully. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is whether you—or them— have more formal power (the more powerful they are, the tougher it will be to win). The second is whether you are fighting back alone or with others, the more allies you have, the more likely you are to win because it is harder to portray you as a lone nut and you also have more power (even against a boss or other powerful person). The third is documentation; keep notes, emails, and social media posts, anything that provides objective evidence that you and your colleagues are in fact being bullied.”

I found out I have no formal power in my own family of origin.

I also found out I was alone in that “family”.

I am the “lone nut”, the scapegoat, the outsider, and as such I am not to be believed, let alone defended.  In some eyes, I am not even supposed to exist, not supposed to take up physical space, be noticed, be cared about.  (With the notable exception of being noticed for what I fail to do correctly, i.e. being criticized.)

And there was no documentation – the incident that started the whole thing, or rather brought it into the light, was deliberately engineered to have no witnesses, other than my husband and a brother who also has little formal power.

No wonder it all turned out the way it has.

A related article shows that there weren’t too many other options.

The powerful bully

Who they are: The engineer with hard-to-replace skills whose creepy overtures get overlooked. The rainmaking dealmaker whose boorish behavior goes unpunished. Whether they’re explicitly in charge or simply influential, too many organizations look the other way when top performers or top bosses behave badly. Sutton points to Roger Ailes — the powerful Fox News chief who left the media empire amid a swirl of sexual harassment allegations. “Going to HR didn’t seem to help anyone for years,” he says.

What to do: Tread carefully. “You’re fighting the cool kids,” Sutton says. In such cases, getting out is really often the best advice — especially if the behavior goes beyond milder incivilities. “This is one when you often leave, or when you hide, or when you lie in wait until their power diminishes,” Sutton said.

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Blame Shifting

Notes from here

…People will blame anyone or anything for their misery sooner than take the responsibility to own it and make it better… The result? More people with more misery, but always with someone or something else to blame it on. 

While blame may ease some of the anxiety, guilt, fear or sense of responsibility, it does nothing to solve the problem…

You probably know or have known people who always have an excuse, never taking ownership for what they could do to make their situation better… Often, within the first five minutes of talking with someone, we can tell that solving his or her problem is going to be a long, uphill battle. Not because the particular problem itself is unsolvable or the condition untreatable, but because the most important factor required for overcoming it is missing: the ability to take responsibility for one’s own life.

On the other hand, when someone does have that one ingredient – the ability to take responsibility – we have more than just a vague hope for him or her. We know that this person will get better. It borders on absolute certainty.

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Tattletale

This morning at about 5:30 am, the cat woke me up because his timed feeder failed to open.  So I took care of that and then went back to bed. At which point a memory surfaced.

I felt an ache in my left leg, and the term “charley horse” came to my mind.  What followed that was an immediate association with my two youngest brothers.

And from there came this forgotten memory, of going to my mother, possibly crying, because one of my brothers had given me a “charley horse” when we were “playing”.  There could have been a trick played on me, as in, “Do you want a charley horse?” when I didn’t know what one was, so I would say yes.

So if my mother was in the house, I would have been younger than 6.  My gut feeling is that I was around 4, which would put my brothers at 7 and 11.  And my sense is that this happened in the afternoon, maybe after school for them.  I want to say that it happened outside, and I don’t remember a coat, so it was probably warm weather.

Anyway, I went looking for my mother and found her, lying in bed, and my view is that of being about level with her back, which was turned towards me as she lay on her side.  I can see her aqua colored housecoat.  She doesn’t turn over to look at me, let alone hug me or show concern.  She doesn’t even move.

And when I complain to her uncaring back about the physical harm my bigger, older, stronger brother did to me, what I was told may not have been in these exact words — but the meaning I clearly get, the words in my head now are,

“No one likes a tattletale.”

This is how my mother apparently dealt with me being deliberately physically harmed, at the age of around 4 or 5.

It puts the blame on me for having bothered her with my problem, my pain and distress.

It makes it clear that she isn’t going to do anything about it.

It contains the threat that “people aren’t going to like you” (which she continued to use on me throughout high school).

I now know that what was meant in all those cases — what she was really saying, but couldn’t say aloud — was “I don’t like you.”

And finally, it fits the familiar pattern:  I ask for help of some kind, and I get told in no uncertain terms that I’m not going to get what I ask for.

(Of course, you mustn’t think that this shows my mother being NEGLECTFUL.  I have it on good authority that she’d have had to be going to a BAR and leaving the kids in the CAR, for it to be NEGLECT.)

So.  My recourse at that age is going to be one of two things:

  • go and tell Dad, and try to get some help – although I am certain he wasn’t home, or I would have gone to him in the first place;
  • or, with the threat of not being liked hanging over my head, which maybe also prevents me from going to Dad, because of the fear of losing the one person I can trust and count on in the entire world — (which coincidentally would expose her complete lack of care and concern to him, the one person she has most to fear from if she is found out) — I can retreat and stay away from my brothers.

This works for the narcissist on quite a few levels.  They like to keep their audience from communicating with each other — it makes it so much easier for them not to be found out.

My mother’s reaction makes me wonder if there is also an association with the incident at my kindergarten Open House, in the fall of ’74, when I became the “big mouth” — blamed by my mother for having spoken truthfully about my family when I was asked.

If she decided that I was to blame then for speaking the truth, it is not a stretch from there to being called a “tattletale” for speaking up about physical abuse from my brothers.

There were other incidents of physical harm that revolve around them.

Once I was playing with my brothers in the back yard, and for whatever reason was running behind the garage.  I tripped (or was tripped?) and fell on some glass from a broken window.  My wrist was slashed open vertically — the way you’re supposed to do it if you’re serious about bleeding out — and I ended up with 9 stitches and three still-visible scars.

Another time, my second-youngest brother was cleaning a BB gun in the basement, on a big old metal desk we had down there.  I think all three of us younger kids were there.  I was drawing or writing on one end of the desk, and my brother was cleaning the gun at the other end — with it pointed at me.  At some point the gun went off, and I have a middle finger that I still can’t feel the tip of.  My brother claimed he thought it was unloaded, and that it went off when he opened it.  I have my doubts that that is how a BB gun works.

My youngest brother had a definite streak of cruelty.  After the divorce, when we had babysitters in the summer months, we had one who had a 5YO daughter whom she brought with her every day (with red hair, too).  I had no interest in playing with her, so I must have been several years older than 5; the divorce was finalized when I was 7.5 so I had to be older than 8, which puts my brother at older than 11.  Certainly old enough to know that you aren’t supposed to deliberately hurt other people.

He concocted this “game” where he would call her by name, and she would come running into the living room, and then he would hit her with a pillow hard enough to knock her down.

After a while she got smart enough to not respond to his call, so he invited me into the game and got ME to call her name, in order to prolong his fun.  I think I only did it once or twice and then refused to “play” any more.  That poor little girl was crying and she went to tell her mother, but I don’t think she was able to explain what was happening and besides, I am sure my brother said we were just playing with the pillows and she fell down, or something.

Funnily enough, once I stopped trying to play with my older brothers, I can’t remember any similar incidents that involved physical injury.

I’m sure this will be called paranoia by those who have a vested interest in making sure it is seen that way.

Or is it the willful inflicting of pain on another person — one who is already known to be the scapegoat, at least when Mom is home — by a couple of boys who are in pain themselves, and don’t have any other way to express it?  Because of course boys don’t get sad and cry.  Boys get angry, and then physically violent.  And the scapegoat gets the brunt of it.

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The People of the Lie

M. Scott Peck ‘The People of the Lie’

I picked up this book a while ago and have not started reading it yet, but I came across this fascinating passage today:

“There really are people…who respond with hatred in the presence of goodness and would destroy the good insofar as it is in their power to do so. They do this not with conscious malice but blindly, lacking awareness of their own evil — indeed, seeking to avoid any such awareness.

“…Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. They hate goodness because it reveals their badness; they hate love because it reveals their laziness. They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of such self-awareness…

“Truly evil people, on the other hand, actively rather than passively avoid extending themselves. They will take any action in their power to protect their own laziness, to preserve the integrity of their sick self. Rather than nurturing others, they will actually destroy others in this cause… to escape the pain of their own spiritual growth. As the integrity of their sick self is threatened by the spiritual health of those around them, they will seek by all manner of means to crush and demolish the spiritual health that may exist near them.”

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More from Dr. Cloud

The original article

When you need to execute an ending of some sort, there will be people in your circle who will try to fight it or slow it down… You have to be ready for that to occur, recognize it as inevitable and deal with it.

Self-Absorbed Resisters

People will put up a resistance because your decision is going to affect them in some way, and they do not want that to change… that person does not have the kind of character to put his self-interest aside and see what is good for [you]. Passively or actively, this person is on a sabotage mission and is not looking out for you.

This person can appear friendly, offering “advice” to “help” you… This situation I am referring to is one where this is not advice, but an attempt to keep you from going forward.

Threatened Resisters

Other times, resistance comes from someone who is threatened by you personally by what you are doing. Whether in business or personal life, when you do something difficult but worthy, it confronts people with their own lives. It activates all of their fears, and they quickly try to tell you the same things that they tell themselves. “It will never work. I know a lot of people who tried to do that, and they were sorry in the end.” The thing is that they are stuck, you are getting unstuck, and you cause them to look in the mirror and face themselves. Unconsciously, they realize if you can do it, they can do it. But to think about doing it scares them. They’ll talk you out of it so you both can be comfortable again.

The NoNos

NoNos are those who are highly skilled urgency killers. John Kotter says if they cannot undermine attempts at diminishing a contentment with the status quo, they create anxiety or anger and the flurry of useless activity associated with a fake sense of urgency. NoNos are motivated by many things, and as a psychologist, I can tell you that I’ve seen them in many instances. They can be pretty inflexible. They often are not open to what we call “assimilation and accommodation,” a process by which normal people take in new data, accommodate ourselves to it and change our minds.

Not so with NoNos. Instead of taking in new data, they have all sorts of reasons for rejecting it, devaluing it and undermining any accommodation that anyone would be close to making with it. The best way to handle NoNos is not to engage them. They’re trying to stall you, and they are not going to change, so to spend any time trying to convince them is to allow them to use their strategy of derailing. You talk to them, they win.

When you start to make your move down a new path, obstacles will come as a result. Getting things done is hard, or more people would be making changes. So accept the fact that endings are difficult and hard to implement. You will be going through new waters, and there will be waves. Big bumpy ones, and it takes courage and perseverance to keep going.

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An Accident

A story about another family’s tragedy:  a 4YO shot and killed his 9YO sister with a gun.

“…how does [the mother] get past all of this anger? She has told herself countless times that it wasn’t [his] fault. He’s just a little boy. He said he thought the gun was a toy. But every day she has to work at not being upset at him.

“I know this sounds horrible, but do you know how hard it is not to have ill feelings toward a kid? How hard it is not to be upset at Jaxon? Do you know how hard it is?” she had asked the night before. “I have no one to blame. I can’t blame my kid. I can’t blame God because it’s inappropriate. I have nobody to blame. I have no outlet as far as taking out my anger, so I use my family and my fiance as a punching bag.”

I find it incredible that this woman, this family cannot place the blame appropriately on the great-grandfather who left his gun out irresponsibly, and the other adults involved.

Then again, maybe I understand it all too well.  The dysfunctional family who can’t deal with their own culpability, the mother who heaps the blame on the easiest place to put it: on the small child who wasn’t responsible for what he did, the child who now looks for love and doesn’t get it because the adults around him are too fucked up to get the help they need to deal appropriately with their emotions.

“I love you,” the 4-year-old boy says as they drive through their neighborhood, just after his mother, who awoke with another migraine, told him to “shut up and sit on your butt or else.” “I love you,” he says again, a few seconds later, for what seems like the 10th time today, and now no one says anything.

Their tragedy was officially labeled “an accident”.

If anyone is at fault here, it’s the great-grandfather who left the gun out.

Yet the boy’s own mother still wants to blame him, and finds it hard to say “I love you” back when he says it.

A comment on this article also caught my attention:

A long time ago when I was working at a small city FD as a firefighter/medic a different squad than I was assigned to got a call on Christmas morning for a fatal shooting. A 13 year old had gotten a 12 ga shotgun for Christmas and the very first thing he did with it was point it at his 11 year old brother and pull the trigger, assuming his parents (or Santa Claus) had not been stupid enough to leave it under the tree loaded. The shot caught the younger boy in the shoulder shredding his sub-clavian artery and the boy only made it as far as the front yard before he collapsed and died. The responding crew fought hard for the boy but could not revive him.

They said afterward that of all of the hard things about the call the hardest was when the parents recovered enough in the ER to confront the older boy and they pretty much destroyed him screaming at him right there in the waiting area.

So, mind you, that’s professionals — who see this kind of tragedy every single day — saying that the absolute worst thing about it was when the people actually responsible for the tragedy started screaming at the person they wanted to blame for it, and destroyed him.

If anyone reading this blog has refused to believe what I’ve asserted here, has ever denied the truth or at least the possibility that what I have written could be true — read and reflect on this family’s story and STFU.

Poor kid.  At least when he is old enough, he will have the facts available to him, the truth of what happened, and I hope he is OK.