An Update: A Post I am Working On With Someone Else: Do Scapegoats Abandon Other Scapegoats, or Do They Mostly Stick Together?

I have been e-mailing back and forth with Peeps who also writes about narcissism, narcissistic abuse, being ruthlessly scapegoated and mostly abandoned from her family of origin, living in poverty, having a great marriage with someone who is compatible and who shares many of the same interests she has, and dealing with a late stage autoimmune disorder known as Lipedema (autoimmune disorders are increasingly being attributed to growing up being scapegoated and/or living with repeated offenses of child abuse - something new that has been discovered, but has been talked about decades before in child abuse forums among survivors).

She writes much more about her own personal experiences than I do, as she keeps her identity private. 

Anyway, we are both working on a project about scapegoats. Do they mostly stick together and defend one another, or do they mostly come to betray each other, or give into a narcissist in the end?

From all I can tell, these will be the first posts anyone has ever done on this subject. It is not discussed in professional literature, or in articles by psychologists and therapists, or even brought up by other survivors of narcissistic abuse in their blogs and videos. It is sometimes brought up in child abuse survivor forums, however. 

It is an important subject because many therapists strongly suggest that scapegoats who are losing their family of origin try to limit their personal relationships to other scapegoats, that with the shattered trust that comes from being scapegoated, other scapegoats are probably the only people they can trust as they go through the period of receiving lots of insults, lots of unloving and uncaring words, lots of smear campaigns by their family narcissists to illegitimize the scapegoating.

This is scapegoating that has often been endured life-long, or as long as their life with their family members. It also sometimes means losing their entire extended family of origin, one by one over a ten or fifteen year period.

The ostracism tends to include many, or most, members of a family because these family systems are very, very enabled, and require lots of loyalist enablers, and they also tend to be cult-like, an all-or-nothing system where you are either all-in the family, or all-out, and where the consequences for wanting to go lower in contact are very severe. In other words, "lower in contact" often means "out of complete contact" as the narcissistic family members and their most trusted enablers make every attempt to get you out of the family altogether. 

In other words the narcissists in these family systems do not want their ostracized scapegoats contacting any family members, certainly where they cannot control the conversations with family members. They want their scapegoats to be silenced by those family members as well, or for those family members to cease contact with the ostracized scapegoats, just like cults want their followers not to be attracted to, or to talk to defectors who have left the cult.

There will be obvious consequences for any member that has gone outside the cultish family to talk to members who have either defected or have been ostracized. Depending on the type of narcissists running the family cult, they will either insist that some members decline the invitations and celebrations of these ostracized or defected members (such as marriages, baby showers, graduations, holidays, family vacations, and so on), and also to find ways to ostracize these same members from attending their family events, or have the narcissists write the un-invites.

The punishments for going outside these expectations by the narcissists running the family cult can be pretty severe, but mostly include money, rewarding people loyal to the narcissists, and not giving any money to members who have lower amounts of contact and/or loyalty. The punishments are usually the silent treatment, silencing members, insisting that members praise and worship the narcissists, and so on. It's very transactional, in other words, as most "relationships" with narcissists are, if you can call these relationships at all.  

The punishments can run the gamut. The extremes are like the worst case scenarios in family cults. Family cults like the Mafia kill their own family members for perceived disloyalties, or because someone wasn't paid what they thought they were owed for being part of an illegal business scheme, or because they happen to be at an inconvenient location at an inconvenient time. Family cults can go from dis-invites to weddings and graduations, to out-and-out crime families (usually it takes generations to get there, but if narcissistic attitudes are allowed to prevail, and the narcissists are greatly rewarded in a family compared to the scapegoats of a family, you can just about count on it).  

To get a picture of what non-family cults do, and how members can get trapped, even when you bring your wife and kids to these cults, you can research the Jim Jones Jonestown cult (murdering their own members, including whole families, even the children), and the Heaven's Gate cult, otherwise known as the Halle Bopp cult (members who willingly committed suicide together), the Branch Davidians (part suicide, part murder, part being trapped in a large burning building without firewalls, part being gassed/murdered by the F.B.I. in a bunker with no escape) and the Rajneeshpuram intentional community (where some of those members poisoned their townspeople because many of those townspeople did not approve of the rituals and practices of Rajneeshpuram and were trying to drive them out of town, or out of existence, or get laws passed where they could not operate - the diminished remaining members eventually moved back to India).

So can a scapegoat really trust other scapegoats? Do they have to keep their guard up? And what kinds of questions should scapegoats be asking themselves and other scapegoats when these other scapegoats aren't acting as empathetic or kind as they used to? Have they just moved on more quickly, or have they gone back to the narcissists (or trying to go back to them?), or is there much more to it?

And what about scapegoats who still have very minimal contact with the narcissists in their family? Can they be arm-twisted and brainwashed to be suspicious of, and to hate other scapegoats, family ones, and non-family ones? How likely is it? And how common is it for scapegoats to even defect from scapegoat groups, the people who helped them get over their toxic family, and made a community for them?

And is it really necessary to share your story with other scapegoats to heal?

And what do narcissists do in light of their scapegoats talking to other scapegoats? Do they try to "act" nice all of a sudden, or do they continue down their spiral of being more and more cruel, of spreading lots of false gossip, of trying to arm twist a scapegoat into not talking to others or they will endure even more severe punishments than they have before?

Part of narcissistic abuse is weaponizing silence to ostracize. Do narcissists and their enablers start talking all of a sudden? What really happens when scapegoats band together?

So I hope you can gain some insight as both of us wade through this subject. We will publishing at the same time, so that you can see both perspectives.

But I am going to be publishing another post first that may shed some light as to what is happening in "the positivity/gratefulness fad" that is sweeping the USA in new age groups, and in new age thinking. Is this fad sustainable, or just another narcissistic tactic to keep people even more silenced who are going through tragedies than they already are? Is this new age philosophy toxic or not? And is it inclusive or rejecting? Is it about shaming people who are going through difficult times not to talk about the things they are going through? I'll let you be the judge after you read that post. 

Some Personal Gratitude to All Who Have Enlightened Me, and a Little on Why I Decided to Research Topics on Narcissism

This is a personal post for a change. And it comes with a picture I found on social media that grabbed my attention in a big way. 

(Whew! I had so many typos and rewrote this hours later!). To continue:

Most of my posts are research oriented and if you have been reading my posts, you know this.

But this one is about showing some gratitude to my readers and also the people who are in my present life, people who have informed me on this topic, and people who leave comments.

When I first started blogging, people weren't commenting much. I wrote anyway.

When I first started reading about this subject, it was the scariest, most depressing stuff I ever read. It wasn't something my 20 year old self would want to tackle at all. And yet, in some ways, I was writing about this quite a bit even then, only in short story formats.

My last post was about being silenced. But in the most silenced people, there is a story that needs to come out even if it is not in writing. It can be art, or dance, or even conversations with the most enlightened, or understanding people you've ever met. 

You walk around on eggshells for a co-worker, or parent, or partner, or sibling, and then after you can get away from it for any period of time, viola, you've made something out of the experience. 

For instance, a lot of my angel paintings were done during a time when the person I was attached to was not very angelic at all, for instance. I explored what it might be like to be angelic, to be thinking angelic thoughts. I thought about angelic intentions and intuitions. I thought about the mindset where you might think about angels in a lot of life situations and experiences, i.e. more than usual. Angels were the good people, or perhaps they were too good to inhabit a body, so they inhabited the spirit world instead, floating around mostly inaudible and unseen. Perhaps they didn't exist and perhaps they did. Perhaps it meant tuning in, such as you would a radio. Maybe they are stars that would blind us if we truly looked at them (so separate, but influential). Perhaps when you have really cruel people around you, your mind goes to angels so that the cruelty is not a constant reminder. Maybe, for me, I just didn't want to think about cruel people and what they tried to do to others, so the allure of traditional angels in their white gowns and soothing blue heaven with their ultra-compassionate energy and supernatural ability to read minds in an accurate way put me on that path for awhile. 

Most of all, this subject of narcissism that I write about is also about humans who are much more resistant to change than the rest of us, and really do not want to change, doubly scary and depressing. Dealing with the darker personality disordered means they are stuck with their personality disorder and you are stuck with it yourself if you are in their life in any way, whether that be at work, school roommates, your parents, your siblings, schoolyard bullies you barely know, or your friends. You come out of these relationships feeling like you've had the worst experience of your life, exhausted and sometimes sick, often with your life totally turned into tatters. You even wonder why all of their provocations and desire to hurt others were so necessary for them because they don't exactly seem better off for having gone that way; they seem worse off. 

Most of us find out that they have hurt a lot of people if you dig deep enough. And often they hurt them in the same way too. 

I mean, really. Why is it all so necessary for them?

"The necessary part" is the personality disordered part of them going to work, emanating from thoughts and desires of wanting to punish or bully. That's all. If you had narcissistic personality disorder, you'd be expressing things the same way they do. You'd probably be insulting and gaslighting others a lot. You'd be enraged if someone got an award that you think you should have been given. You would hate anyone who looked at you cross-eyed or who criticized you in the slightest. You'd want power, and you'd think you deserved it, and because you think you are superior to just about everyone on the planet, you would think it was owed to you. You'd be lecturing people a lot at the very least. And if you were Antisocial personality disordered too, you'd be a control freak and trying to take from others as much as you could get away with. You'd rationalize any sort of entitlement to other people's belongings, or their job, or their spouse, and you'd be planning on how to take from others, no matter the circumstances. And afterwards you'd have no remorse, as hard as that is to fathom. 

If you were narcissistic and antisocial personality disordered, and you were in charge of a country, you'd want to invade countries without provocation, to take as much as you could possibly get, and if you couldn't, you'd want to destroy countries they live(d) in. Most of your thoughts would be consumed with how much you could get, in fact. Building up an army and an arsenal of weapons would be paramount in your thoughts. You'd be trying to influence other leaders with charm, some trading of goods and raw material, some purchases of weapons, maybe even some minor gifts, while Machiavellian-like you'd be working on plans which only suited you, and you'd also be spending an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out which lies or gaslighting strategies would keep you in power for as long as you want, and getting rid of enemies who criticize you or your ambitions. 

Why is it necessary, or even wonderful to them, to invade countries, take away people's land and homes, and torture them? Why is "man's inhumanity to man" still even on the radar of human activity and consciousness?

This is the kind of thinking that this subject requires, however. 

Otherwise, to a rational, empathetic person without a personality disorder, it makes no sense. And very few people are going to tell you it makes sense unless they are one of them, or enabling the behavior, kind of the way people can enable the terrible behaviors of alcoholics with domestic violence tendencies: "Oh, he was just drunk! He never meant it! Just forgive him already! He didn't know what he was doing, get it?" 

I was lucky early on to have a friend whose family is full of therapists walk me through everything that was said and done to explain how the personality disorder was speaking through that other person. 

I was lucky in high school to have a best friend who was living through similar circumstances I was going through, and offer solace and so much more perspective than I ever could on my own. 

Eventually there was so much knowledge at my feet, that writing about this subject became as "necessary" to me as all of the narcissists that perpetrate attacks on other individuals. I hope this knowledge provides some good defense strategies against narcissistic attacks, at least internally, at least in knowing that their way of thinking and feeling is never going to be the way that you think and feel. With the lack of empathy and lack of understanding that narcissists have in spades, they will not understand who we are, and unless we study their abuses and tactics, and why they all tend to use the same ones, we will never understand them either. 

If we imagine an organ in our body that has gone numb, that's what they are dealing with in terms of their lack of empathy. 

Anyway, your comments do help me to plunge forward into more and more discoveries. The fact that silent treatments that are long, confusing to most of us, and are meant to punish, are primarily found to be perpetrated by dark triad individuals (narcissists with antisocial personality disordered traits). It is the latest news about this subject, and nothing that I would normally find unless I was plugged into this topic. I had to pass it on to my readers.

It means you don't have to scratch your head if you get a punishing silent treatment, or try to figure out how to resolve it, or spend lots of time on what was said that could have set it off. It's just another narcissistic-sociopathic punishment at work, period. It's part of their "arsenal of weapons", if you will. 

It also means, in the end, that it's something that is pretty exclusive to them.  

The other side to this is that most of us are not equipped to deal with punishing silent treatments, just as most of us cannot live with active alcoholics who perpetrate domestic violence. And especially if it was done more than once. It's going to turn most of us into "runners" in terms of getting away from them. We know that too from the Gottman Institute because of the research that they'd done on this phenomenon, and that psychologists and psychiatrists have tried in similar experiments, to see if they came up with the same conclusions. Yes. 

Who knew that an aggression and responses to the aggression were so predictable? It takes research, and has to include people who bring these subjects to the public. 

So, to get back on topic, the comments keep me going forward.

I found out that a friend on Facebook had been reading my blog in the first years after I started it with the words "narcissists in the workplace" in a search engine. At first she didn't recognize that the article she was reading was from me. I have another life as a visual artist, and that was how she knew me, so she did not make the connection at first. And then she saw one of the art works I made on Facebook, and immediately recognized it and responded.

From searches, to trying to find out ways to heal from narcissists, people have been showing up.

So thank you!  

I do have another life away from this blog, and since I was inspired by the picture above, I decided to write about my own life in those terms too: 

     For me life is very much an artistic journey, whether I'm drawing and painting, putting designs on doors in my house, writing, and even my cooking mostly gets a creative spin on it and is different every time.
I feel lucky that I can look at everything as a creative project. Even my marriage is chock full of creative endeavors, a lot of intelligent thought and perspectives being put into experiences and projects we share together and apart, and we never run out of things to talk about. It's pretty much always a fascinating journey with him, very rarely mundane. And best of all, we are allowed to be ourselves, to be fully loved for who we are. Never under-estimate a good marriage, I say. We didn't start out this way (it was rocky and tentative at first), but I think the fact that we are both creative and share so many interests, and really appreciate what each other does, it's a dream to wake up each day with each other.
My life has had a lot of hurts in it, too many really, but even that gets a creative work-over with artistic expression, marriage, and even healing has its creative off-the-beaten-path avenues.

featured:

a painting I did last year that seemed appropriate to how I feel this year:

purchase a print or card if you want to