Being the Scapegoat S*cks: Here's How to Break That Cycle

In this episode, I’m diving into the complex and painful role of the scapegoat child in families with borderline or narcissistic parents. If you were always the one blamed for everything—while somehow also being expected to keep the peace—you’re not alone. I’m the scapegoat in my own family, and I know how exhausting and confusing it is.

Families like this often use your emotional reactions to reinforce the idea that you’re the problem—giving them a convenient excuse to avoid their own accountability. This toxic pattern runs deep, but there are ways to step out of the scapegoat role and start healing.

Here’s what I cover in this episode:

• What it really means to be the scapegoat in a family with BPD or NPD dynamics
• Why your emotional responses are often used against you
• How staying emotionally regulated helps you reclaim control
• What happens when you stop playing the role—and how it forces the family system to shift

Want more tools for setting strong boundaries with a high-conflict parent? Check out my on-demand boundaries workshop at confidentboundaries.com/boundaries-workshop, and come join our supportive online community with weekly live coaching calls at confidentboundaries.com/join. 

Grab my free guide, 5 Guilt-Proof Boundaries That Actually Work (Even With a Toxic Parent):
confidentboundaries.com/guilt-proof-boundaries

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Torie Wiksell is a therapist and coach who specializes in working with the adult children of parents with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. Torie brings a unique perspective having spent years working with clients with personality disorders and growing up with a mother she suspects had NPD with BPD traits. Torie provides online therapy to clients located in WA, OR, and CA, and online coaching internationally.

Disclaimer: This podcast is not therapy. If you are in mental health crisis, please contact the Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988.

You're Not Crazy is a podcast owned and produced by Torie Wiksell and Confident Boundaries, LLC.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Workshop Announcement
• 2:52 Community Updates & New Group Sessions
• 5:54 Understanding the Scapegoat Role
• 9:32 How Families Use Your Reactions
• 12:42 Breaking Free: Emotional Regulation Strategies
• 17:36 Finding Hope & Episode Closing

Transcript

Torie Wiksell: 0:14

Welcome to You're Not Crazy, a podcast for the adult children of parents with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. I'm your host, tori Wixel, a therapist and coach with over a decade of experience in the mental health field. Now let's jump in, hi and welcome back to this episode of You're Not Crazy. I want to start by saying thank you so much for being here this week and also I apologize for getting this episode out slightly late to you this Tuesday morning. I had the entire podcast professionally edited and when I got it back the audio was really messed up, and I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I'm thinking perhaps my microphone didn't pick up and the audio recorded through my computer instead. Here we are, tuesday morning, and I am-recording this episode for you so that I could get it out to you guys as soon as possible. Let's talk a little bit about what's been going on in my world this week and then we'll jump into the heart of our episode. Today we did the second round of the live boundaries workshop how to set boundaries with a BPD or MPD parent and it was great. I honestly had so much fun doing both of the live rounds I've done so far of this workshop and everyone who has been in attendance has been awesome and asked the greatest questions, and I feel like we have just gotten through so much in such a short period of time. So, on that note, I'm really excited to announce that, starting today, you will be able to take that same boundaries workshop on demand. So if the time didn't work for you previously, you can still go over to confidentboundariescom slash boundaries workshop Right now. There's still a wait list on there, so if you're listening to this on Tuesday, it either might be up and available live or you might see the wait list. Join the wait list, because everyone who is on the wait list is going to be the first group that is emailed access to the recorded workshop. So join the waitlist or just sign up and you can take it live, and you can still get access to that boundaries cheat sheet that I gave to everyone who attended it live, as long as you participate in the workshop and stay to the end. So I'm really excited about that. I think it's going to be really, really helpful, and I would love to hear your feedback after you take it too.

Torie Wiksell: 2:52

What else has been happening in my world? If you are following me on Instagram, I just want to say I'm not giving up Instagram. Life has just been really busy lately, and so I will be circling back, hopefully later this week and start posting more over there again, but I did not disappear for forever from Instagram. On a really exciting note, I met with an awesome photographer last week and took new photos for the podcast and for Confident Boundaries, and we did a really fun photo shoot, which is definitely not in my comfort zone wheelhouse, but I had a great time doing it. So you will soon be seeing an updated podcast cover for You're Not Crazy, I'm really excited about that and you'll see some facelift updates to the website in general as well.

Torie Wiksell: 3:50

And on another note, I know that time is valuable and me being on the West Coast does not mean that you're on the West Coast or West Coast time in the US. You might not even be in the US at all, and because of that, I know that my Monday 2 pm Pacific time group coaching call doesn't work for everyone's schedule. That's why I'm really excited that in the next couple of weeks I'm going to be adding a second group coaching call in the Confident Boundaries online community and if you're not familiar with the group coaching calls, every week I hop in the community live for an hour and anyone who's a member can pop up, say hi, ask me any questions that they have about their family dynamic or, if they have any questions, talk through what they're struggling with that week, get feedback on their specific situation that they're running into issues with, get feedback around whether or not their boundaries are realistic or appropriate or why they may or may not be working or effective. Talking about no contact challenges all of that. So, no matter where you are in your journey with your BPD or MPD parent, you are welcome to hop on those group coaching calls. So everyone in the group or everyone in the community right now has opportunity to vote on a time and day that would be preferred for that second time slot that works with my schedule, preferred for that second time slot that works with my schedule. So if you are excited about that possibility and that opportunity, definitely make sure to hop on over to confidentboundariescom slash, join and check out the community. We would love to have you there. It's the best group of people ever and I genuinely mean that. Everyone who listens to this podcast, who reaches out to me, is just a wonderful, wonderful human. Well, with that I think those are housekeeping notes, so let's dive into the episode.

Torie Wiksell: 5:54

I want to talk about being the scapegoat in your family. I am definitely the scapegoat in my family and let me just tell you, if you are not, if you play a different role in your family dynamic, none of it is fun. I'm not trying to imply that being in another role is any more fun than being the scapegoat. However, I am saying being a scapegoat is not a dream role to play in a family and I think anyone who is the scapegoat is not a dream role to play in a family and I think anyone who is the scapegoat in their family can definitely relate to that.

Torie Wiksell: 6:30

One of the shittiest things about being a scapegoat is that you are both constantly blamed for things and then expected to keep the peace at the same time, and that is such a mindfuck. When your family implies that you are too anxious, too dramatic, too, whatever, you're always a problem. And then, at the same time, you're expected to step in and solve all of these problems in your family and you're the one who is constantly trying to keep the peace and anticipate what everyone is thinking and what everyone needs and just trying to prevent bad situations from happening. It really messes with your mind. So, with that said, scapegoats have another task that they have to deal with when it comes to healing from a family dynamic where you have a parent with BPD or MPD, and that is.

Torie Wiksell: 7:41

It's up to us, as scapegoats, to learn how to stop playing that role. And again, that's super shitty because the reality is, when we're being scapegoated, it's other people gaslighting us right. It's other people saying, oh my gosh, if you just weren't this way, our family would be so happy and everything would just be so wonderful and beautiful and hunky dory, and that is just such a bullshit. However, they're not going to change, and when you have a family like this, when you grew up in a dysfunctional family, the people in your family get their needs met in really dysfunctional ways, and that includes us as scapegoats. We're taught to interact in a world that is not healthy and is not honest and where the rules change all the time, and so we are taught to meet our own needs by trying to mind, read and guess what everyone is thinking and what they're going to do and what they really mean, even though they say something else. We take on this codependent role of trying to regulate everyone and everything in our family to keep the peace and to try to prevent a major disaster from happening.

Torie Wiksell: 9:06

And what happens when you're the scapegoat is you're trying and you're trying and you're trying so hard and you're doing so much and you're putting so much into just trying to make everything okay and you keep getting poked at and you keep getting blamed and you keep getting jobs and you keep getting gaslit and after a while you just lose it. And losing it can look like a bunch of different things, right? Maybe for you, losing it is crying. Maybe for you, losing it is yelling or snapping back or storming out. Right, you get to a point where you lose it because no one could handle that level of emotional attack without having some sort of reaction. And what that does for your family is it allows them to continue to blame you. It allows them to say see, tori is the problem, we're all fine. If it wasn't just for Tori losing it from time to time, then our family would be great. Like you just need to, as my mom used to say literally all the time when I was growing up just take a chill pill, just take a chill pill. She's like literally the worst thing you could ever say to someone who's emotionally dysregulated or upset or having any sort of emotional experience whatsoever, kind of all the lines of I know I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but there's no crying in baseball. There's no crying in baseball. Don't say things like that to anyone Not that I imagine anyone listening to this podcast would but worth mentioning at least.

Torie Wiksell: 10:58

When you are the scapegoat, the role you play in your family is that you give everyone else an out for taking accountability or responsibility for their behavior, because when they push you to that point where you break, they then have something that is quote-unquote real. It's taken out of context though, right, but it's quote unquote real. Like maybe you did snap, maybe you did cry, maybe you did storm out, that did happen. And they can isolate that one behavior, that one action, and throw it on the pile of just how crazy and what a problem you are, and that absolves them of all responsibility of any of their actions. And so, when you're the scapegoat, the only way to remove yourself from that role is to be completely non-reactive and non-engaging. That means gray-rocking it. That means not participating in any back and forth. That means saying what you mean and saying it one to three times, not repeating it like a bajillion times, saying I don't like that, following up with I don't like that and not reacting and then walking away calmly and peacefully when you are the scapegoat. You cannot give your family a reaction ever, because that gives them an excuse to keep doing what they're doing and that gives them this distorted reality where they can point to you as the problem for forever and it's not helpful for anyone and it's not true. And it's not helpful for anyone and it's not true and it just makes it that much harder for you to heal from all of this.

Torie Wiksell: 13:03

And so, if you are the scapegoat in your family, I want you to know that the most important thing that you can do for yourself is to prepare to be very unemotional when you are with your family. And if you look at your emotions I know we've talked about an emotional scale, I think, on the podcast. I know I talk about it all the time in like day-to-day happenings but if you think of your emotions on a 1 to 10 scale, where 10 is the most intense version of that emotion that you could possibly ever feel, zero is like neutral. You are just content, not really emotional at all. Anytime you get up towards a five, you need to do something to bring that emotion back down.

Torie Wiksell: 13:55

You do not have the luxury of allowing your emotions to get up above a five, to get up to a six, seven, eight, nine, ten, because that is where you snap, that is where you have a behavioral reaction that your family can point to and say you're the problem, and so the best advice I could give you as a scapegoat in your family on how to stop playing that role is to really really practice when you are not around your family, just checking in a few times a day, maybe three or four times a day, setting an alarm to go off and just asking yourself what emotions are coming up. For me right now, if you can't think of any which is not uncommon when you grow up in a family like this because we are not taught emotional intelligence just do a quick Google search of emotion identification chart and a bunch will come up, probably with happy faces, like kids see, and that will give you options of different emotions that you might be feeling and just pick out a couple and then rank them on that 1 to 10 scale. This is you teaching yourself how to recognize what you are feeling and how to recognize the intensity of what you're feeling, so that when you are in a much more stressful environment, like being around a parent with BPD or MPD you now have a practice skill set that you can turn in words and reflect on and use in order to help yourself create a new role within your family and to remove yourself from that scapegoat role. Because the reality is, unless you are the person that removes yourself from that role, your family never will. Because once you do, your family never will. Because once you do, then they all have to figure out what the new norm is, and if they can't point to you to blame you, what do they do? Then that creates a really uncomfortable thing for families and it's not conscious, but this is a pattern that we see in families. Families want stability, they want to keep the norm, just like people like stability and they want to keep the norm. And so if you no longer participate in that role that you're playing, it now forces everyone else in your family to recalibrate, and that could be a good thing. It definitely will be a hard thing for them, and that's why it's so important that you're prepared for how to do that, because they don't want that, but I know you do so.

Torie Wiksell: 16:56

On that note, if you are the scapegoat, there is hope for you. I feel for you. I promise I am right there with you. I just had a very scapegoaty family interaction at dinner last night myself. So you know it's a journey. So you know it's a journey. With that said, you know where to find me. Make sure to go check out that Foundries workshop, if you haven't already, and if you're loving the podcast, I would so appreciate it if you shared it with someone who also might love it and rated us five stars. It helps a ton. Thank you, guys, and I'll see you next week. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of You're Not Crazy. If you like the podcast, please leave a review and rate us five stars. It helps so much. And make sure to check the show notes for links to bonus podcast episodes and other ways I can help. See you soon.