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.