An Update: New Studies in the Field of Trauma Recovery and Reactions, 500 Peeps Latest Blog, and Some Other Thoughts on Sycophants in Today's Politics

 
From NICABM (features Pat Ogden, PhD, Stephen Porges, PhD, Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Janina Fisher, PhD, Kathy Steele, MN, CS, Deb Dana, LCSW, Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD   and Thema Bryant, PhD):

Treating trauma is some of the most demanding, complex work we do.

Eye contact can feel unsafe. Relationships can trigger survival responses. Clients can become overwhelmed and dissociate before they even begin processing their trauma.

That’s why we’ve gathered 18 of the world’s top trauma experts to share the latest insights on working with trauma in this Advanced Master Program.

When trauma takes hold, the nervous system goes into survival mode — trapping clients in patterns of fear, dissociation, and shame.

But new research is revealing groundbreaking strategies to help clients rewire their trauma response and break free from these cycles.

Join 18 leading trauma experts, including Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Janina Fisher, PhD, and Stephen Porges, PhD, in this advanced training.

One of the things these experts found out is that trauma survivors, and especially people with PTSD, don't do well in "talk therapy". There is a tendency to feel "flooded" in a talk therapy session - where you can hear the advice of the therapist for awhile, but then cognition starts to fall off, and then you can dissociate. This is especially true for people who feel the freeze response (fawn, fight, flee, and freeze being the main trauma responses). 

The freeze response is actually the most unhealthy of the trauma responses and that is where people (or clients) can dissociate or begin to have dissociative experiences. It starts out with minor dissociative experiences and then as traumatic experiences multiply, the dissociative experiences multiply too and also become deeper (i.e. where cognition of current events goes off-line in more extreme ways). 

The freeze response is particularly notable for child abuse victims because the fight and flee responses are more or less impossible for smaller children - and child abusers punish a child for having these responses anyway. I would also argue that the fawn response is not possible for children given the scapegoat role either as the caretaker rejects the fawning, or insinuates that the child doesn't mean it. So the only response that is left is the freeze response. 

However, this group of mental health experts also came up with other trauma responses, notably the Collapse and Submit Response, the Please and Appease Response, and the Attach and Cry for Help Response. 

I'd bet the Collapse and Submit Response as well as the Attach and Cry for Help Response have a lot in common with the Freeze Response in that they can lead to dissociation and an inability to be present at all times in conversations, and especially when lectured at, verbally abused, or told to do something that is wrong, or unethical, or repeatedly told to do things that you don't want to do (over years). 

The freeze response isn't just thoughts running through your head like "I don't know what to do" or "Nothing I do works", but it also has many, many physical ramifications where your ability to respond at all goes off-line. What responses you do have left feel frozen too: frozen screams, freezing up when you are touched, freezing up on choices you have to make (for the "mortal fear" of making the wrong choice), missing opportunities because you freeze up on responding, even thoughts freezing up (like becoming obsessive, or not being able to let a thought, or experience, or feeling die off). 

The freeze response is definitely one of the worst trauma responses in terms of what it does to the body and brain, especially for children exhibiting these responses. 

Because a child cannot express outwardly what he or she is feeling and because they are often silenced by the abuser too, the feelings have to be stuffed, to stay within the body, and this is where we find that it wreaks havoc on the head, heart, stomach, immune system, and muscles primarily, and probably other parts of the body too. 

It is one reason why scapegoats often prefer other trauma responses when they are finally able to do so (like in teen years or adulthood) such as running away, or fighting it out with lots of defenses, arguments, analysis and explanations, or being rebellious, or taking substances to get out of obsessive depressive thinking styles, feelings of utter exhaustion and retreating (often misunderstood as laziness), or feeling disgust for their torturers. 

Scapegoats also have a lot more ability to seek out real love than a golden child because narcissists most often neglect or discard their scapegoat children and those children often use those times to explore, and most often don't return, or return in a way where they are shoved back into their old role. But let's face it: most family scapegoats are expected to be scapegoats for life, thus most of them find their own way in the world.

Fawning isn't very effective for scapegoats because people who torture know that the amount of torture they inflict doesn't deserve a fawning response, so they suspect that it is "fake fawning". Fakeness  enrages narcissists, of course, even though they are a lot more fake and inauthentic than most everyone else on the planet. They figure you are them when you fawn. 

Freezing is the response of last resort (for golden children who mostly fawn, they can find themselves suddenly on the wrong side of a narcissist where fawning isn't producing good results, and may also use the freeze response, but it is usually only temporary, whereas for scapegoats, they may be reacting via the freeze response throughout their childhood and beyond).

Anyway, freezing is often an anxiety response, where the cortisol levels go up and cause stress to the body. Sometimes golden children will keep trying all kinds of fawning and flattering responses to get their systems and the narcissist to become more stable, as they were before. 

One of the leading trauma experts, Bessel van der Kolk, MD, found that trauma effects the entire brain, not just the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and amygdala as has been touted for decades. Granted those areas of the brain are effected the most, but some parts of the brain become over-active, and other parts simply go off-line or don't function like they should, or used to. 

I always thought that had to be the case, but I was otherwise told it wasn't. It was great to finally be confirmed about what I knew from my own body and no longer be living in a state of denial about it. 

When I was around "bad people" (as I used to call them in childhood), I always got "whole head headaches" afterwards. Not that this proved then or later, that the whole brain was effected, but the physical ramifications were hard to miss.

The headaches could be very mild or severe and I always thought it gave me a gauge as to how dangerous or toxic a person was (although I didn't know the word "toxic" when I was a kid - I referred to it more as "too many nerves in my head that are making my head hurt"). I had plenty of other symptoms too including stomach aches, and a profound lack of sleep. And the lack of sleep also played a role in keeping the headaches going. 

And even when I had breaks from trauma-inducing experiences, there began to be a kind of feedback loop where the headaches produced a lack of sleep and the lack of sleep produced the headaches, and all of it made me uncomfortable living in my own body for a time until the symptoms could subside.

Anyway, when the whole brain is effected, I'd bet the entire body is effected too as another break-through study and course from NIACBM includes How to Work with the Limbic System to Reverse the Physiological Imprint of Trauma. 

Another hurdle that many victims of child abuse can relate to are feelings of "I'm not good enough" often transferred from a parent who does not love his or her child, or expects perfectionism in deeds, thoughts, facial expressions and looks, and especially if the child is rejected by a parent over these kinds of things. Parental "coldness" (not caring how you feel) is another way you can experience feelings of worthlessness. 

There is a new course for that too (mainly for therapists to get further education, but there is no harm in studying what is going on with beliefs like this). 

The course is called Practical Strategies for Working with a Client's Feelings of Worthlessness, also by NIACBM. 

What I have found most interesting is that feelings of worthlessness can effect the neuroplasticity of the brain. 

So much is happening in trauma research, types of trauma reactions and trauma therapies, and this is where I'd eventually like to take this blog, although I've started to discuss it in many of my most recent posts. It is a whole other research subject, and more interesting to me personally, but also tied to how to deal with abuse and the long term effects of it. 

500 HUNDRED POUND PEEP'S BLOG POST
ON SCAPEGOATS AND POVERTY
AND HOW SO MANY SCAPEGOATS ARE NOT TAUGHT LIFE SKILLS INSIDE THEIR FAMILY
AND ARE INSTEAD LAUGHED AT AND BLAMED FOR THE POVERTY THEY FACE INSTEAD

I had planned on writing a blog post myself on this subject, but Peeps, as I call her in public anyway, decided to publish hers before I could get mine done. That is what happened for another post on Do Scapegoats Rebel (one that I planned on publishing with her but still haven't totally finished).  

Yes, there are a lot of things distracting me at this time, so I understood her need to publish before I could get mine done. 

Anyway, I think her post on poverty is a really brilliant and much needed article and it is a subject that hasn't really been explored much, in research groups or through interviews, or even in terms of talking about individual experiences except in forums for survivors of child abuse and minorly in therapy groups. And why not, since most scapegoats experience it at least once in their lives? 

We know that narcissistic parents want to hurt their scapegoat children (most scapegoat children are abused and conspired against throughout their entire childhood unless the golden child screws up in some way that drives the parent to be angry enough to pit the golden child against the scapegoat child in a contest for Mommy or Daddy's love and attention). And what better way to hurt the scapegoat child than to thrust him or her into a black abyss of poverty, especially right when they turn 18 and can legally be thrown away like so much trash (until, again, the golden child does something that the narcissistic parent does not like). In other words, if you are discarded in the early part of adulthood, or at age 18, as so many scapegoat adult children are, they may very well intend to groom you to live in poverty and to tolerate poverty, intentionally, especially if you grew up with parents who had enough money to feed you, but you were being underfed, if they had enough money to dress you, but you were either given rags or dirty clothes, ill-fitting clothes, or hopelessly out-of-date hand-me-downs so that you were bullied and teased at school over them, if you were isolated from the rest of your family members so that they could not hear your side of the story and automatically assumed you were at fault for the absurd amount of punishments you received, and if you were treated like a second class citizen to your sibling(s). 

In addition, you were not taught how to traverse the world of adulthood, so you had no idea how to survive in it. 

I personally had to read her post in two parts as it starts out like a Russian novel and builds to most of  what scapegoats live through. 

Some of the passages I found to be particularly relevant and stood out for me are these:

* She talks about how ACONs (Adult Children of Narcissists) aren't taught how to live independently so they don't end up in poverty, about how they are mocked when they are a child ("You'll never live in a beautiful place like that!") instead of encouraged to do well "So that you'll end up with a beautiful house like that."
   "Slamming an ACON's self esteem makes it hard to learn important life lessons like this. Instead you are either laughed at for thinking living in a nice home is out of your reach, or taught to please and flatter your narcissistic parent as the most important lesson of your life."

* She talks about being an art teacher and director of art at a summer camp and why she chose it over other careers. I found this fascinating because that was largely my life too as well as selling in galleries and art centers.  

* I found this passage right out of the playbook of many ACONs:
     I saw it with Aunt Scapegoat, they seemed to derive joy listing off her horrific medical problems while clucking their tongues. Her poverty too often was the stuff of legends..."she hoarded food you know!", "Grandma had to buy all her clothes!'' "Her trailer was full of trash!" As a child, I lived in terror of ending up as poor as her, as she was put down constantly in front of me.  It would only occur to me later, that my mother had the means to make her life a lot better instead of letting her sink into such extreme poverty. I would end up as poor, though unlike her, we got some better working class years and her level of poverty was definitely worse.

*   I found this passage to be true to my own experience of talking to scapegoats with disabilities:
     I got into a discussion, talking about this issue. Family wealth for the scapegoat is not protection from poverty. One guy told me online on reddit that they should study what happens to the financial security of the disabled who come from better off families?
     He wrote: Do children of wealthy families with disabilities or visible abnormalities have a measurable difference in financial security relative to siblings, similarly-aged people from middle/upper class families, and comparable peers from poor families?
     He said that someone should do a graduate thesis on this, it would be an interesting sociological topic. I was in a disabled group, and a group for autistic adults [on Zoom] and a group for those with serious pain disorders and chronic disabilities [on Zoom]. I  did note that family support for the people I met, was far far higher. Many of the autistic adults lived at home with parents including 2 men at my level of autism, who were well into their 50s. There was a few married women like me, they encountered career problems and some were physically disabled, but they had supportive families. No one related to my level of poverty. It surprised me. One woman did live in subsidized housing but had a loving family which probably bolstered her feelings of independence.  In the pain disorder group, one lady who had lupus related problems but was still employed, lived with her mother and it seemed to be a positive situation. In the disability group, I met a man who lived with his brother, and another man who lived with his mother, who were locals and had about the same level of autism as me [what was referred to as Aspergers for decades] The latter man was very overweight at my size but he didn't have the same health problems and could still walk, function, drive and work.
     Many of these people had challenges, and in the case of the autistics, career troubles, were common, some did work very hard, and one man did volunteer work during his unemployed periods. Their families seemed to help them. The fellow fat man admitted to me he did face some judgment from his family but others seemed cared about and looked after. Their challenges were not used to reject them as people, like what happens with someone with narcissistic parents. My disabilities were seen as "my fault". All of them. The weight issues complicated that but they had no mercy for anything else including deafness and breathing problems. ...
     ... Some of the disabled people in my groups got really sick, and their families looked out for them. Sometimes it was hard for me to hear about because my situation was so opposite. I have a husband who has looked out for me so am not saying my glass is empty because he's definitely stepped up for decades. There's a lot of disabled people with serious health problems on their own. I get scared for them. It was just interesting to see the different attitudes of more loving families towards disabled members. It's pretty sick that narcissistic families will get out the hammer on people with serious health problems.
     But outside of illness, how many scapegoats find themselves in the streets? No home to go to? I dare say there's probably a lot of abuse victims who end up homeless who end up as "orphans" out in a harsh world. Social workers, churches and the world assume everyone has a family. This simply isn't true. For those of us without one, there's no one to turn to. No one has our backs. I learned the hard way, going no contact many years ago, no one in the family cared that I was gone. During my most extreme poverty in my 20s, no one cared about me. I missed meals [yeah I know that's ironic as fat as I am] and went without needed possessions, there were times I had literally nothing but ripped up clothes to wear.  ...
     

* This passage, I think, is super relevant to whether you can "make it" as an adult (trauma symptoms impacting your health and life):
      ... First and foremost due to ACE scores, stress, scapegoats can have health problems.You are on high alert, never can relax, your parents never let you sleep or even physically toss you on the floor from your bed. This wrecks children's health adding hormonal and obesity problems especially. As a child I never could relax or sleep. I was always on my parents schedule, for years I had severe insomnia, I never felt safe enough to fall asleep I always had to be on my guard.
     As your physical health is decimated, your mental health is at risk. Severe stress, and trauma all take their toll. Some people will get DID, disassocation, PTSD/CPTSD, anxiety disorders, depression and more. I have talked about this very much just here and there, but my anxiety disorders were very severe. They included almost daily panic attacks, and a feeling of "unease" and fear at all times. I have been diagnosed with PTSD/CPTSD by three different therapists, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder and OCD issues during my life. My anxiety disorders were not career enhancers. I had to learn to hide my worries and anxiety because I realized my "neuroticism" made people angry. There were years, I was checking things for hours and having to hide this from roommates and others. My anxiety is in a far better place now, I still struggle but it's nowhere as severe as it was.
     Sometimes at work, I could barely keep it together. No one during my student teaching when I had to move back home knew I was going from working with kids all day to having people scream at and threaten me and I could barely get any food either, which oddly made me fatter. I saw some old pictures from myself from the 1980s, and I'm always cringing, I always look like I'm ready to dodge an incoming hit. Well I had to be ready to duck at any time.  ... 

* Super relate-able:
     ... Mean Parents Don't Teach Their Children Anything
     One thing many ACONs attest to is the lack of life skills, one does not acquire much knowledge from narcissists, they chase their kids out of the kitchen or garage and slap at kids who don't become instant experts. Dad's good at the stockmarket? He'll never tell you it's secrets. Dad's good at fixing cars? While he's screaming at you about being lazy and to hand the tools over quicker, he'll never give you the chance to try and fix it yourself. Mom's good at cooking? She certain doesn't want anyone to outshine her, so you don't learn one cooking trick. You are given low knowledge tasks like whipping the mashed potatoes or wiping the counter. The only way I found out what my mother actually put in recipes was by finding her old handwritten cookbook in a notebook.  Paying bills? That remains a mystery. Narcissistic parents won't tell you things like what the monthly budget is. You won't learn how to write checks, or buy a car or rent an apartment unless you are one of those lucky kids who gets a life skills class. At the same time you remain hopelessly ignorant, they get angry at you for not knowing things but then still don't tell you anything!
     They want you to keep you helpless so you are dependent on them and don't want you able to stand on your own two feet. They desire your failure so you are easily controlled. They don't want you financially independent. Some narcissistic parents will even sometimes give a scapegoat a little money or help, it's random, and for control to keep you in the game but you'll never see them give help, like with a job even if they have the means to do so. You aren't taught how to function and often your attempts to gain more independent and financial independence are thwarted. They tell you to pay high rent as you desperately try and save money to get out on your own. They ignore your health problems while telling you to work hours, they  would never dream of doing, such as when I had a 7am-11pm schedule every day during student teaching.
     This is a common way scapegoats are sabotaged. Many of us grow up and then realize with horror the depth of life lessons and practical know-how that were denied us. We don't know how to do anything. My struggle with life skills continues, some of this can be autism, but right now I am doing calculus in my head, to even figure out how to pay 5-6 different medical bills, the electric bill and how we are going to afford food next week. I keep an entire notebook dedicated to survival. It has housing lists in there, everything turned out be HUD programs we don't qualify for except for the one I am on the list of or they were in very bad areas or ones off the bus lines. Lists of where all the food pantries are, and what day of the month they are open, the number and address of the car repair charity place, and where one can get free furniture and clothing. When I was young I didn't even know where to go to get charity or how to utilize a food pantry.
     Yes. My parents were upper middle class. We lived in a neighborhood of million dollar homes where people hired live in nanny's housekeepers and or at least a cleaning lady on the regular.  Our house was more humble but at 5-6 bedrooms it was very large and there were other large homes around us and the million-dollar homes were just down the street. The country club was right around the corner from the house I went to in high school. Many ACONS are people who descended the ladder. The life I grew up in was not the life I got later. I was unprepared for what awaited me. I was prepared for a culture I never would live in as an adult. 

There is so much more to her article that will ring true to any scapegoat who had to live through a period of poverty. I think the very personal experience she writes about is decidedly better than what I have to say on this subject, although I do have some more statistics to add to the discussion. 

I only lived through a little less than two years of poverty myself from age 19 - 21 or so, and it was super challenging. The lack of food was one major issue (my meals were mainly "unpopular vegetables" with a little butter on them because they were cheaper than anything else: eggplant, turnips, rutabagas, those sorts of vegetables ... and only one meal a day so that I wouldn't run out). I also had trouble with the bureaucracy at the food stamps office where they required me to get a refrigerator - I think you can understand why it was impossible for me to retain one. So I went without help or food. And I was working and going to college at this time. 

As for my career in art and art teaching, I did have that in common with Peep. Was it a good career to choose for someone like me who was trying to rise out of poverty? 

Maybe not, but I thought it was at the time because when I was 18, I lived in a seaside tourist town where I met a potter who was not only able to live on the money he made from his sales, but support a wife and send two children to college. I don't think that is possible to do today unless you have a good trust fund from rich parents or grandparents, or are teaching in addition to making pottery, or you are a "star potter" with a huge following. 

Also at age 20, I learned about Camille Claudel and wondered if that was a warning sign for me. Beatrice Wood served as another warning for me in later years. Over the decades, having met many, many female artists, I have learned that most of the successful ones in my field are either hated or resented by their families (birth family, that is). Many have found solace and contentment in their marriages and in their children, but so many of them feel like outcasts of their family of origin.

Many of these artists complain that they feel they have to "turn off their talent", or "turn off their authentic selves" or "turn off the beauty in their work and focus on what's ugly in their pieces, or what's not working" or "turn off that they are artists at all" or pretend not to be as successful as they are in their art career around their family at least. Very odd, and something I'd like to explore a little deeper. 

Granted there is something cultural about critiquing art and artists as compared to most other professions, so that definitely holds some sway in terms of how visual artists are treated, but I find that the rate of alienation between female artists and their birth families to be alarming and severe, especially among fantasy artists, surreal-art artists and statement-oriented expressionist artists.

Female artists who practice abstract art, landscape art, art for textiles, artists who paint "cute animals", or flowers, or pretty young women in gardens mostly seem "safe" from alienation comparatively. I am trying to figure out why. 

At any rate, as in early childhood and early adulthood when I was a scrapper (looked hard for the minimum to survive very adverse childhood experiences), I was also a scrapper as an artist. My catapult into the art world was in Neo-expressionism or what I call "statement art", but I couldn't make it in that alone, and "something had to give". In other words, Neo-expressionism requires a nest egg, or fantastic luck, or a trust fund to start a career in it, to get into the museums that show this kind of work, so since I realized that, I "scrapped" together an art career with art teaching, being a curator, a studio manager, art director at a summer camp, display chair-person, entered local shows where "statement art" is not accepted and where landscapes, "pretty pictures" and abstract art is accepted instead, a greeting card business, a graphic arts business doing advertisements, creating Etsy and Zibbet banners for other artists, and later website design with my husband where we made and maintained websites for authors, artists, a museum, and others. I also performed music on the weekends, and practiced music in the evenings for upcoming gigs. 

It's probably not an exaggeration that I worked 70 hours a week at the very, very least. 

I think most artists and art teachers have to work these kinds of hours. 

From talking with Peeps, her life went largely in the same direction, but being disabled with many challenging medical issues stopped her from insane schedules. It also put her into poverty. 

I can't help but think that her life would have been even more like mine had she not been so ill. 

Anyway, a post on poverty and scapegoats will appear one of these days (and also another proper link to her post besides the one above), but it won't reveal much more of my own personal details than I have written here. 

SOME THOUGHTS SINCE THE INAUGURATION
OF A NEW PRESIDENT IN THE UNITED STATES
AND TRUMP'S DISMANTLING OF SO MANY GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

What a time it has been since the second inauguration of Mr. Trump! Like so many Americans, we are trying to navigate our way through chaotic policies, the whiplashes of high tariffs followed by taking them off, a stock market and government employees gone crazy with deep losses and sometimes gains, the higher-than-usual prices at the grocery store, waiting to see if Trump invades Greenland, or Panama, or Canada, and wondering what will happen with Ukraine, Syria and Gaza. 

It's been hard to follow the flood of headlines since the inauguration, and even harder to understand why they are being done. Let's face it: the Democratic and Republican answers to much of what is going on is rooted in speculations as to what it will achieve, one party having a more dire interpretation to all of it, and the other party a more Pollyannish view. 

I tend not to have Pollyannish views when it comes to politicians as I believe many are there to have lifetime memberships in their appointed positions and will do anything, sway any way that is convenient to do so. Not that they are all like that, but I speculate that a majority are. 

I have talked about how disturbing the war in Ukraine has been for me personally. There isn't a day I don't worry about what's happening there since the war started and whether or not it will end up to be about Ukraine caving into and being swallowed up by Russia, or discussions between the United States and Russia about carving up the world into "empire building" where Trump might say, "You can have Ukraine, the Baltic States and Syria if I can have Canada, Panama and Greenland without interference from you", not that this is happening, but I wasn't the first person to think about that possibility.

These are the worst case scenarios, of course.

Then which child abuse survivor didn't feel triggered, or at least have a Deja Vu by watching President Trump and Vice President Vance shout down Zelenskyy at the Oval Office? 
* conspiracy theories (check): such as Zelenskyy wasn't really elected ("a dictator without elections" was what was said to him) as well as "gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III. And what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country ... " 
* Victim blaming: trying to convince Zelenskyy and the world that he and Ukraine are at fault for the war (check)
* Zelenskyy being silenced (check)
* Zelenskyy being talked or shouted over so that he couldn't respond (check)
* Zelenskyy told that he's "said enough" as though he's a little boy. (check - and by the way, wasn't this meeting supposed to be about negotiating? How can you negotiate with this going on?).
* Zelenskyy being told he's not expressing enough gratitude (check).
* Zelenskyy told he needs to apologize (check).
* Zelenskyy was asked why he doesn't wear a suit (check. As though everyone should dress in the same uniform - to reveal the sycophant side of themselves?).  

Certainly Zelenskyy is not making a mindless fix easy with unwavering won't-give-up-any-gains-Putin. Putin has violated ceasefires 25 times, and that is making it even harder for Ukraine to cave into Russian aggression, including Russians' gains of "dead cities" and land-grabs. So ending the war in a day isn't working out so well for Trump and it was a grandiose statement to make regardless, not a thoughtful one of taking into considerations how opposed Russia and Ukraine are in terms of what would make peace or a compromise possible. 

Maybe Trump needs the adulation of ending the war quickly so he can keep his word, and when it isn't given to him as quickly as he wants, the punishments come? Or he hands "a win" over to one of them? And what's in it for him? That he can end the war in a day, adulation, attention, blaming and blame-shifting, or something that's a bit more thoughtful than many of us have seen so far?

Is the message here you must make peace? You must compromise? You both must take some losses? "Russia, you must give Ukraine back its territory"? or "Ukraine, you must cede some territory to Russia"? 

Or is it going to be: "You must give something to bullies and invaders, and give into bullies and be grateful for what they give you, and for what you have left."

Is it any different than what child abuse survivors deal with in their abusive families? "Negotiate with bullies"? Is that the way this always goes no matter if it's in the family, in the community or on the world stage? 

And must bullies always win something to keep them from attacking you further? I think we know the answer to that. 

This is where my curiosity is at the moment: what will Ukraine have to compromise on, if anything? And how will they be treated going forward? 

At the time I write this, no more weapons are being given to Ukraine from the U.S.A. to defend itself, but what other punishments must it endure I wonder other than more missile attacks from Russia?  

So that issue being played out on the world wide stage is also bothering me, as well as the continual disappointment that human beings are so violent, still so unempathetic to other people's plight (at least for my tastes), that human beings display way too much sycophancy when they feel over-powered (and that has kept my attention more than any other subject in recent current events), so inept at fair negotiations, so inept about assessing their own abilities, and more ego driven than seems reasonable, sane or possible. 

But most of all, there is the sycophancy of senators, congressman, justices, cabinet members, voters, newspaper owners, media companies, law firms, churches, and world leaders. That is so stunning to me.

But I shouldn't be so stunned from all of the research I do on this subject, but somehow or other I was not prepared or aware enough of the numbers (!) of sycophants. I also wasn't prepared to see how much people were willing to give up for a leader, and give into a leader, and to repeat crazy-making statements of a leader, and prostate themselves to a leader no matter what they did, what they said, how they acted and whether there are ulterior motives for all of these things. 

Who knew that being led without any reservations was so popular, especially with the whiplash policies enacted and detracted by this administration. 

What happened to: "I agree with this policy, but not that policy", "I think this step is too unethical; I'd rather go in this direction", "Why don't we try ----", "What would you think if we had a 3% tariff instead of a 25% one, and saw how a lower rate played out before raising it? With the advent of serious trade wars, is it really wise to slap a 25% tariff on so many things Americans now rely on?" - Where are these kinds of discussions among Republicans? 

Then there is what Martin Luther King described as "the appalling silence of the good people." 

I wonder to what lengths and depths the sycophancy goes before they stop being sycophants? Or is there a bottomless pit of it to the point where they appear to have absolutely no convictions, no thoughts or minds of their own, no actions of their own, like one of those wind-up robot storm troopers who fall all over one another in Darth Vader's regime?

Or will they simply be lobotomized in a final act of taking every shred of a will if they dare anything other than mere puppet strings attached to their mind and soul? 

People who have literally lost their own minds in exchange for being dictated to can't really serve a country, let alone constituents, can they? 

So maybe I'll write an article on the sycophants themselves after a number of years have gone by just to see how much they will sell their soul, to see how much they give up on morals and truth-telling, to see how much criminal behavior they have let become normalized and "every-day", to see how much hypocrisy they allow in policies and laws, to see just how much the sycophants mirror their leader even in terms of speech, types of words, types of expressions, and types of dress and hair (as the "favored" children in abusive households often do), to see if they all get voted out or disfavored when and if Trump ever vacates the Oval Office. He has said that "you'll never have to vote again" ... another link from Reuters via You Tube, another from ABC 7 in Chicago via You Tube, another from SP ESPN (full clip of Trump's part of that speech via You Tube) so I doubt he's planning on leaving willingly.

And how will that play out? 

Trump may have to go to The Supreme Court, or ignore The Supreme Court for a ruling on that!

So why won't we be able to vote again? Because each and every loyal sycophant and their storm troopers will guard all of the voting booths throughout the land from being used? Will there be Marshall Law because America has invaded Canada or Greenland, or because the country is too broken to function?

And then there's the Department of Government Efficiency run by a guy on daily doses of Ketamine, Elon Musk, a non-native from South Africa, who said that "empathy is destroying American life" (and here's another link where he remarks that "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.") What could possibly go wrong with that? - said facetiously, of course! 

The dismantling of government agencies is startling, with many mistakes requiring re-hiring, which tells me that impulsivity and speediness are top agendas in these matters. "Destroy and build back if we need to"? But what if those workers find other jobs in the meantime?

In terms of the empathy deficit issue, the problem with having empathy (trying to mind-read Musk here) is that you can't just blindly and without reservation go fire thousands upon thousands of workers without feeling something about their plight, or about the beneficial jobs they did for the American people, or about the people who were reliant upon these agencies, or about any reactions to it at all? "We don't care about any reactions at all to the dismantling"? Is that it?

Without empathy, I'd bet you can destroy just about anything you want without thinking about repercussions fanning out into all aspects of society, culturally, personally (health, disability and education, transportation), and even ecologically, financially and internationally. 

Or is it a ticket to a couple of individuals feeling powerful and invincible 24/7? 

I heard from someone recently who lives in the northeast that their local Wildlife Reserve's building for its workers was without heat and lights, and that the government had taken them off of their website. So this is how they keep from firing workers directly, just make sure the heat and lights for the buildings aren't paid? Hmm, I suspect there will be other stories like this about government agencies or reserves, yes?

And then there are the tariffs (or at least the threat of very high tariffs). I agree with economics Professor Emeritus Richard Wolff on that. It's not about lowering taxes, the usual broad policy that American Republicans usually vote on. It's adding huge taxes of 25 % on imported goods when most of what we buy from food, to petroleum, to clothes, to construction supplies and everything in-between are mostly exported into this country. So it won't make the average Republican voter's life better; it will make their lives considerably worse. And it will cause inflation. 

As for Democrats who are willing to pay more taxes to get more services and safety nets, they've been let down too economically. The amount of taxes doesn't seem to add up to many services any more, at least not the kind of services you'd expect for the amount of money you pay, and not the kind of efficiency you'd expect. So they are disenchanted with the economic picture too, and probably even more angry than Republicans are that the tax money they pay are going to tax breaks for the billionaires. 

And the reason why the services are falling apart and getting dismantled more and more is because their taxes are being used to pay on the debt, at least partly. And who owns most U.S. debt? China and Japan. China has used the money to build their own big empire and to align with Russia, Iran and other dictatorships. 

Where do all of these facts I write about come from? Economists, and researchers and professors of economics (like Richard Wolff). Look them up yourself. 

Knowing all of this, I decided to take some time to reassess my own life and challenges in the present time, which is why I haven't been publishing posts for this blog. 

In the meantime, my general questions about humans who are granted power, attention or rewards run along these lines (talking about the sycophants among us mainly): 

* How often do humans give up their own convictions and moral codes to get more rewards, attention and power?

* What is the rate of abandoning convictions in terms of getting more rewards, attention and power?

* And are they more likely to give up convictions and moral codes of conduct when they feel threatened by a dictatorial person? 

* Are they willing to give up more convictions and moral codes of conduct to the more brutal dictators than the less brutal ones? 

* Are there any studies on whether sycophancy makes a person less intelligent, less able to make good decisions? Does it decrease cognition, shut off parts of the brain similar to PTSD, decreases the ability to decipher effective outcomes for problems that take a lot of detailed thought? Since all a person has to do is parrot, I wonder how much any kind of thinking goes off-line?

* Are sycophants more lazy than the rest of us? 

* Do sycophants primarily do what they are told to do to get the issues off of their back?

* Do sycophants fawn much more than they need to if they are yelled at or over-powered verbally (such as Trump did in the Oval Office when Zelenskyy tried to speak)? 

* Why do so many sycophants stay quiet when a leader is yelling at another person? Do they want to speak up? Or do they shrivel from speaking because they are frightened? 

* Which is more prevalent for sycophants: the freeze response or the fawn response, and in what contexts?

* What parts of the brain go off-line and which parts light up when they see their "dictatorial person" walk in the room looking angry? Looking calm? In a rage, even if they are just the bystander? In a blinding rage, even if the rage isn't making sense to them? Looking smug? Rolling their eyes? And so on ... (I'm sure these answers aren't available and haven't even been studied ... I haven't been able to find much of anything).

* Is the human race, in general, becoming more boot-licking or less? Are we evolving to become more fawning or less fawning? 

* And why do scapegoats of societies fight back against being expected to fawn? Are they really different in that way compared to most people? Is there something different about their brains even? And if fawning and sycophancy is "the normal way", do they feel outcast because they aren't like that? 

* How much do people respect sycophancy when it goes to more and more extremes such as normalizing constant raging, sins, ethics, crimes, and murders? Is there really no end to ever-deepening sycophancy once someone goes more and more in that direction? Do they even know what they think, believe, know any more? Or can it all change in an instant?

* Do they believe the dictator, or do they self-check? And if they do self-check, how much, and is it dependent on how ruthless the dictator is?

* And if "their great leader" falters and falls from disgrace, do they minimize the fall, or the unethical behavior and say things like, "He had his good points", "He's human. Like everyone, he made mistakes", "It really wasn't that bad", and so on. And do they tell others who were hurt by his actions to "forgive and forget", to "move on already!", to "think about the future", to "think about the good things rather than the bad things he did", to "be thankful for what you got rather than unthankful for what you didn't get", to "see him the way we did", and so on. 

* Do most sycophants have splintered personalities where they don't know who they are except as an arm and a brown-noser of a dictator? 

* Do sycophants like being similar to a dictator, or are their actions primarily fear-driven? 

* Do sycophants like being sycophants until their leader is disgraced? 

* Do they think that not being a sycophant isn't a normal human quality, that rebels are abnormal or sub-human? Do they have arrogance as a sycophant as compared to rebels? 

* Do they think that when they are a sycophant that they are showing gratitude, even if that leader has very few altruistic motives and very criminal ones? 

* Do all sycophants think in terms of loyalty and gratitude no matter what unethical policies are being enacted, or how many crimes are being committed (in other words, how common is this way of thinking for sycophants)?

* Are there more rewards for sycophancy, more acceptance, than speaking your own mind and having convictions? Or does it just look like more rewards with terrible down-sides towards the end of a reign? 

* How often do sycophants serve as flying monkeys to a dictator in the end (flying monkeys referring not to just enabling, but doing the dictator's bidding, dirty deeds, and crimes, and also taking the rap for those actions instead of making the dictator responsible and accountable)?

* How often do lawyers, prosecutors and judges become sycophants or enabling? What are the statistics on that? Does sycophancy in these professions lead to corruption? It would seem yes, right?

I'd really like to know the answers to these questions, but undoubtedly they have to be researched by bona-fide researchers at universities and colleges to make the research scientific, and I doubt there's anything but a handful of articles, if even that, written about this phenomenon. 

In the meantime, I'll watch congressmen, senators, judges, cabinet members, et al, to see how far they'll go into more sycophancy, to see if it is the popular personality type of the moment or of the years. I bet it gets tested to the max! And I'd bet this is what Trump means in terms of loyalty: "How much of a sycophant can you really be for me? And by the way, do you believe the 2020 election was stolen from me?"

FUTURE POST

Before I publish my posts on "Poverty and Scapegoats" and "Are Scapegoats Really Rebellious?", I finished another post on hoovering, a subject that is important in the study of narcissism and why survivors often go back to their abusers. Hoovering is also a precursor to stalking, and stalking is against the law.

Hoovering is something that I mention enough in my own posts, but there is either no link, or a link to other writers on the subject. Because it has been written about extensively I thought it would be a bit redundant or boring. 

No. It was actually pretty interesting and vital to the discussions and includes how narcissists use head games and manipulations to get you "back into your place" on their power and control hierarchy, where they take the lead, and you take the rear, of course. If you refuse to get back in place, I discuss the repercussions of that. And with narcissists there are always repercussions even with the ultimate in what they want: total and blind sycophancy. 

An Update: Writing More Posts With Another Writer

Peep (not her real name) of the blog, Five Hundred Pound Peeps, and I will be publishing more posts together (this is her statement about that). The last post we published together was this one. 

We thought it might be more helpful for our readers. I do as much research and reading as I can on a topic, and she tells the personal side of the story. 

The next one in the series will be about rebellion and scapegoats. The title to mine is: "Are Scapegoats of Narcissistic Families Really Rebellious? Or Is It Just a Complaint by a Narcissist to Get the Scapegoat to Be More Submissive?" 

Another topic we will cover has to do with the positives and negatives of going "no contact" (dealing with family estrangement). I have shared a lot of personal stories of others in the post, A Psychologist Speaks Out About People Estranged From Their Family, and Narcissistic Abuse Survivors Speak Out About Suicidal Thoughts, Scapegoating, and Losing Their Entire Family of Origin, but I think this new post will add even more insights, especially details on positive aspects of going "no contact" as that one had a bit more to do with the negative aspects, and some anger towards narcissists. For instance, one of the more positive aspects is the ACON community (another link here, or try a twelve step group here, or go to your local domestic violence center and find a group there). I also offer some personal perspectives, and things I've tried, and things I would have changed in that post, and hers will be mostly about personal issues she has had with going "no contact." 

As you can tell, a lot of our posts are about scapegoats, and geared towards scapegoats and what they go through. We hope it is helpful to other scapegoats. 

Here are other topics we will be writing about in the future: 

* Do Scapegoats Really Resent the Golden Child? Or is it Just Something that Narcissists Make Up or Assume So That They Achieve Their Goals in Hurting the Scapegoat?

* Ways in Which the Scapegoat is Often Arm-twisted by the Family to Accept Bullying and Mobbing

* Muscle Aches and Pains When Traumatized from Abuse (with a Discussion on How Narcissists and Sociopaths Contribute to It)
     (note: this one requires a lot of study into the science of trauma and the physiological reactions to it in one's body, and some of it is hard for me to understand because I do not have a medical or science background - but it is interesting enough for me to pursue and hopefully explain it in a way that will be enlightening. It is one of the symptoms that can have a major impact on other organs of the body, causing more stress on the body, and once you have it, you have it in spades. It's hard to ignore, and if you aren't aware of conditions like Generalized Anxiety Disorder, you can think you have a bad case of Fibromyalgia or that you have a disease of the nervous system. It's systemic - every muscle is effected. It's one of the major physical symptoms, which many child abuse survivors experience along with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It may take me awhile to publish compared to other posts, but it will hopefully be interesting to you as well as Peep's post where she will talk about when and how this set of symptoms came about, and her struggles with it on a personal level). 

Another post Peep has suggested to me is that we do one on "poverty and scapegoats". I think the way I'd like to tackle this is to get a lot of stories from scapegoats and to see if they went through a period of short term or long term poverty and if it is a common experience among them. My intuition would say yes, at least the ones who are either shunned (and I use the word "shunned" because narcissistic families are very cult-like - you aren't acknowledged in any way if they discard you - even the fact that you are alive is not acknowledged) or the scapegoat has left of their own accord.

I could also contribute to the discussion because I went through a period of poverty between ages 18 - 21 (and I had jobs during that period and at 19 was going to college full time too, and a story to tell about the bureaucracy hurdles of trying to get food stamps during that period). It was also a period of rampant sexism in America where young women made quite a bit less than men. Employers constantly told young female workers that they weren't going to get paid for extra work or overtime, and in my case, my boss withheld two weeks of pay because I was dating someone my boss thought I should marry. There was the constant "drone" that women had no place in the workplace and to get "hitched" and have babies instead. Young men made passes at you at work, and if you rejected their advances, they could lord it over you about the fact that they had more money, higher wages, and could get in higher positions over you, no matter how talented you were because no one liked "a pushy woman asking for a job." It impacted my life. 

I would like to do a post on scapegoats and sexism, and how many shunned or treated-like-a-minority scapegoats are vulnerable to sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual harm, sexual ostracism, being cheated on, and sexism. In terms of narcissistic families, I did hear somewhere that girls have a much higher rate of being scapegoated than boys do, as high as 13 - 1. If true, this may have to do with the fact that boys are favored in society too, or at least once were. We will see how a female politician fares against a male politician (but I would bet that if she does win, it is because women will go out in force to vote for her). 

At any rate, it is going to be harder for Trump to beat her with his usual insults and name-calling. Calling a woman "crazy", "lying", "nasty" and "stupid" is what domestic violence offenders call women. It is also what girls are often called too in child abuse situations. These are the most common words of violent perpetrators of women and girls at any rate. Perpetrators also indulge in false narratives and smear campaigns about women. It's going to cause any woman who has been called these names to vote for Kamala Harris (and I bet it would be significant numbers of them, at least that is what I predict from my mini corner of the planet).

If she does get elected, maybe it is a sign that "enough is enough" when it comes to male leaders and their agendas for women.

One of the reasons we are doing these posts together is to give you a wider breadth of a topic, what I have researched and discovered from hearing survivor stories, how it effected Peep on a personal level, and so that the most informed decision can be made, especially if you are a scapegoat of a family.

For instance, the most difficult and major choice you can make in your life if you are a scapegoat is whether to respond at all if you've been discarded or shunned by your family, what typically happens if you respond to a shunning, or if you've made the decision yourself to go "No Contact" after a life time of being treated like a second class citizen in the home and sometimes even in the world at large. That is one of the major topics we will be discussing.

Some other scapegoat posts I have written are listed HERE. 

Do Scapegoats Hurt Other Scapegoats? Also, Can Scapegoats of Narcissistic Families Target Other Scapegoats in Their Own Family? Plus a conversation with another blogger.

(Note: This post was written, edited and published in tandem with Peep who has a more personal story to tell on-line in her post, and also a longer tale to tell about scapegoating in her latest published zine. I introduce Peep and her post in the introduction section below). 

But first, can scapegoats hurt other scapegoats? Yes, they can and do. Beware!

And by the way, I am referring to scapegoats of narcissistic and sociopathic family systems, and to some degree, alcoholic family systems can have similar qualities.

Just about all narcissistic and sociopathic families have scapegoats. But why? 
1. as a means to blame someone for wrongs or crimes family members commit (i.e. for blame shifting and projecting their own faults on to one or two children in the family)
2. As a way to justify abuse (family members are allowed to verbally abuse and possibly get away with other forms of abuse, but if a scapegoat so much as criticizes someone from the family, they are severely punished)
3. As a way to explain away the difficulties the family is having (gaslighting; i.e. "our crazy child is usually at fault for the reputation we have", keeping the family reputation clean by calling a scapegoat child crazy or insane). 
4. as a means to rage and mistreat (scapegoats are used as the family garbage dump for the parents and their other children's rage and pent up needs to abuse - they feel they can't do it with their friends, teachers, bosses, other family members, so they use a scapegoat or two to take their frustrations out on). 
5. as a means to use the scapegoat as an example for other family members, i.e.
     * "If you don't do what I want you to do it, when I want to do it, you will end up like the scapegoat, ostracized and bullied. Is that what you want?" (narcissists are control freaks, and the more controlling they are, the more they insist on having their own way every time on every issue, and the more blame-shifting they are, the more likely they will need a scapegoat - the shunned ones are the ones they use as an example for other members). 
     * "If you don't do well on that test, you're going to look stupid, just like the scapegoat." (narcissists usually think their scapegoats are stupid - they often "talk at" fully grown adult scapegoats as though they are still 7 years old, and other children and adult children in the family see it. They are talked at as though the scapegoat still needs to learn lessons from Mommy and Daddy, as though they still need approval from Mommy and Daddy, and because scapegoats can still be trying to hold on to some vestige of family life, they sometimes put up with being talked at in this destructive manner, thus they are deemed to be stupid and inept, having the brain and emotional maturity of a seven year old.) 
     * "If you marry this person, you'll be marrying a person without much money, like the scapegoat who married that loser." - trying to control who their child marries, by comparing their potential spouse with the scapegoat's spouse. 
     In fact, the rest of their children are always being compared to the scapegoat, as ahead or behind, as though life itself is about a competition for approval, and they are expected to do much better than the scapegoat (so that the scapegoat can always be seen to be hierarchically inferior to the rest of the children). 
    Conclusion: A family scapegoat is used by the parent and other children to get their other children to spend most of their time "pleasing the parent". 

INTRODUCTION

I was talking about this with Peeps (of the Five Hundred Pound Peeps blog). For those who don't know of her, or who haven't read her blog, and the many comments she has left on this blog, Peeps (not her real name) has come out with a fictional zine based on her life as an ACON. ACON translates to Adult Child of a Narcissist. In the book, she has two parents who are narcissists. Her mother, she reveals, also seems to have Antisocial Personality Disorder traits, perhaps to the point of over-shadowing the Narcissistic Personality Disorder traits. Peeps also weighs, plus or minus, 500 pounds at any given time due to an autoimmune disease called lipedema - stage 4. Autoimmune diseases are very common for children and adult children of abusive narcissists. 

She writes about both topics most of the time. There are forays into what it is like to live in poverty (many of the disabled and many ACONs live in poverty, at least for awhile, and sometimes forever). She also writes about the misguided attitudes people have about ACONs, attitudes people have about "fat people" (fat prejudice) without understanding anything about all of the complexities of the subject and various diagnoses that can contribute to it, and attitudes people have about other people who live in poverty, especially the educated poverty class (she and her husband have upper level degrees). 

She was a substitute art teacher in the public schools and worked for a grant-based art program focused on visual arts in a juvenile home before she became disabled. She now shows her artwork in local galleries.

She has just come out with a zine describing what life can be like as an ACON, and as someone who has to carry around a lot of extra weight, and how poverty effected her health and "fitting in" with various social groups. 

There is a lot to being an ACON and disabled in America today, and all of the new discoveries that are coming out every month about this subject makes it clearer to professionals in the field that the avenue to healing for ACONS is that discussions about physical symptoms and autoimmune responses should be part of the therapy.

Patients and ACONs also contribute a lot to the discussion and need for studies, perhaps more so. Anyway, she gets me thinking about various topics that haven't been discussed before, including what this post is about, ways of thinking about issues when I'm not looking in the right direction, and sharing details about our lives (we have so much in common! Even a lot of tastes!). Our intellectual discussions can be quite lively. And I'm thankful that she is in my life (it's a blessing) and in many ways she has been a guiding force. 

I hope you will also consider buying her zine to help support a fellow ACON. And if you are not an ACON, I hope that you will consider buying it to see what an ACON goes through. I haven't seen anyone tackle this subject in zine format, and with some humor along the way, so that is another reason to consider it: it is a trailblazer in that way. 

We are also publishing concurrently on this subject of a scapegoat hurting another scapegoat, so please consider hopping over to her blog to read a more personalized version of scapegoats hurting other scapegoats (and if you are a scapegoat wondering how to deal with another scapegoat "who just can't seem to get over their experiences, of being scapegoated", especially if you've gotten over your own situation and have moved on, please read on to gain some understanding of what may be going on).  

Now to get to the subject at hand ... 

A LOT OF SCAPEGOATS HELP ONE ANOTHER
BUT IT DOESN'T MEAN THEY ALWAYS WILL

One way that I have seen scapegoats help each other is in the workplace. Scapegoats, more than any other type of person, will find it really, really hard to see another worker bullied. As we know, bullying brings out the worst in bystanders or the best. 

The typical scene in bystanders are: 

* joining the bully or bullying without regrets. They don't even perceive the bullying as "being wrong".  There are no regrets for letting the person be bullied.
* Joining the bully or bullying with regrets (feeling pressured or looking at it as a case of the majority or leader "must be right to bully this person, and my thoughts on this matter may be flawed"). 
* watching the scene unfold without getting involved (this is the route that most majorities take).
* watching the scene unfold, but feeling shocked and frozen and wondering if you'll be next (this is another common response) - it is a trauma reaction, but the thoughts go more towards preserving the self and their job than to helping the bullied person
* defending the person until the bully threatens the defender (this can happen with some scapegoats). They become fearful of losing their job, an income, or being considered for a certain advancement. They "cave in" eventually, and stop defending the other person even if their conscience is on fire.  
* defending the person stoutly and not backing down, and pointing to the damages the victim is undergoing (this is the route I see most scapegoats of their families take when they go out into the workplace).
     For the scapegoat of a family looking at someone else get bullied in other life situations feels like an attack on oneself because the familiarity of being bullied looms too large for a scapegoat to just sit back and let it happen, which is also a trauma response. It activates the "fight or flight" responses in the brain, with the "fight" response taking over predominantly only because there are two of you, the victim and you, not just a singled-out person with no defenses. 
     Most bullying is done for hypocritical, erroneous reasons where there is a lot of projection going on. In the workplace, one reason for its existence is that one worker feels threatened by another worker's expertise, hard work ethic, or salary. Another reason for scapegoating (a person who is bullied by a mob, as in mob bullying) is that the scapegoat is bringing up complaints about workplace policies and treatment, complaints that OSHA regulations are not being followed by the company. Scapegoating can also happen over education, looks, age, race, sex or popularity. It can be anything, but I would bet it falls into these categories more often than not.
     Someone is picked on by a bully, and it either has a fast or slow trajectory.
     The slow trajectory would mean false gossip, false narratives, smear campaigns and complaints about the victim to see how other people are responding to all of it before they escalate, to make sure there is no resistance to scapegoating/bullying an individual.
     That will not sit well with a scapegoat either. They are very much ethics sensitives, spies and even psychics, at least some of them, and if something unethical like that is going on, it will drive most scapegoats crazy enough to speak up and defend the victim, even against a huge crowd. Scapegoats are called rebels for a reason - and this would be it. 
     But what often happens is that the victim, the main scapegoat, who is being victimized and whose name is being dragged through the mud, even though you are helping, defending and willing to go to bat for the main scapegoat, the main scapegoat will begin to feel the workplace is unbearable, more unethical than they can stand, disgusting even, and will leave under those circumstances. 
     Then the defender of that scapegoat becomes the new scapegoat (the secondary scapegoat) and the workplace bullies and enablers begin to attack them. 
     Sometimes scapegoats of families wonder why the scapegoating continues in a bunch of workplaces. The reason why is that a bully saw them as a threat to them in the workplace (salary, expertise, work ethic, etc), or saw them as weak and disenfranchised, or saw they were a secondary scapegoat, the more important topic when it comes to this post. 
     In my own life, I experienced two work situations where I was a secondary scapegoat, so I know what happens in these situations intimately, over many years, and all of the trials, sadness and injustice  that the primary scapegoat went through (and it was horrible and so undeserved!). 
     The way I managed to hold on and not meet the fate that the primary scapegoat did was that I was onto them right away, whereas the primaries were taken by surprise, i.e. surprise attacks. I knew all of the tactics the bullies used by then (each individual bully specializes in certain modes of attack), and I was always two steps ahead of them.
     I had ways of being unnoticeably vague, distracted by work, or in a rush, when a bully would ask me a pointed or personal question, but I would never lie. I was unusually quiet, unrevealing, kept to myself  in most places that I worked too.
     I can say now that vagueness works with bullies because they see more to your story than you are telling them. In other words, the bullies would take what little information they received from me and go off on increasingly wild tangents of untruth. It took years for them to get into the wild tangents, but having grown up around too many bullies in my childhood, I saw that all of them tell lies about other people. At some point in their narratives they seem to believe in the lies they tell, and eventually end up as conspiracy theorists, spouting the most ugly untruths about others. It seems like they are getting away with it until the following can happen:
     From personal experience, when the bullies in these two workplaces were found out, i.e. spreading the most far out, untrue gossip, the bullies were in trouble, not me. Recordings worked wonders too, and I would suggest that to anyone who is starting to be bullied in a workplace. 
     I was never the primary scapegoat in a workplace, only the secondary, but because I have experience with what happened to the primaries by proxy and defending their honor, and the secondary via direct experience, I feel like I know this subject pretty intimately, and how to counteract it with the most effectiveness. Perhaps I will touch on this subject again at some point.
     So how does one scapegoat betray another scapegoat?
     Defending a person who is being bullied, even fighting for their rights and making it plain to the bullies that it is not right, not fair, not empathetic to their plight which, as I said before, scapegoats of families are likely to do, they do it with one caveat: they only take it so far, because they begin to fear they will lose their job, an income, or the boss's considerations for their hard work, and be singled out eventually, that the workplace will become as depressing an experience as the primary scapegoat is experiencing it, that they feel they cannot get through their days at work unless they back off, and some of them eventually betray the primary scapegoat. 
     And this folks, is how scapegoats can hurt other scapegoats in all walks of life, in the family, in friendship circles, and not just in the workplace. They become scared of losing something, or scared of what the bullies will do to them. It sometimes takes a long time for the secondary scapegoat to back off of protecting the primary scapegoat, to become a bystander, or even worse, a bully, but this is mainly how it happens. And narcissists, who usually only want one target to deal with at a time, are usually very persistent in trying to get the secondary scapegoat to back off. The narcissist(s) use a lot of manipulations, and sometimes awards, to get that secondary scapegoat to abandon the primary scapegoat. 

     Secondary scapegoats who take the route of backing off from helping the primary scapegoat can start spouting an attitude too - like "(The narcissist) isn't so bad if you talk to them. You have to be gentle and very, very patient. I can get along with him even though he isn't the easiest person to get along with. It's because I show patience. Why can't you?" or even the much milder "I can't fight everyone's battles for them."
     It is a devastating turn of events to the primary scapegoat as they are now defenseless.        

MORE ON:
WHY WOULD ONE SCAPEGOAT HURT ANOTHER SCAPEGOAT
AND HOW OTHER SCAPEGOATS TYPICALLY HURT OTHER SCAPEGOATS
AND TAKING A VIEW OF HOW IT HAPPENS IN FAMILIES

 
First of all, it is not common for scapegoats to become narcissists. They are the least likely to become bullying narcissists compared to all of the other children in an abusive authoritarian family. The more likely child to become another narcissist is the golden child, the obvious favorite of the narcissistic parent. (the link is to a Psychology Today article).

The scapegoat however, can become a reluctant enabler of a parent if there are two scapegoats in one family. They can become a source of competition (i.e. feel that they are better at something than another scapegoat is in terms of emotionally accepting and adapting to their "outsider" and "shunned" fate), a source of contempt (i.e. they are tired of, can't stand, or don't want to be around another scapegoat to remind them that they are one too), a source of irritation. In other words, they feel they are being looked at as a healer of other scapegoats and they don't feel they quite measure up (because they have their own needs of protection) - this type of scapegoat was represented in the series, Maid. In this series the main character meets her first friend in a domestic violence shelter, the friend gives her a lot of encouragement and advice, and later finds that the friend ignores her after that friend goes back to her abuser. 

These are just some examples of ways that one scapegoat can hurt another scapegoat, or let a fellow scapegoat down.

Some scapegoats can even become narcissists, but it is rare only because narcissists tend to choose the most empathetic and sensitive of their children to become the target, the scapegoat of their abuse. Most narcissists see empathy as a weakness, as cowardly, as a weakening of defenses, as a weakening of an ability to attack effectively. They see empathy as something other people will exploit, use to their advantage, use to abuse the empathetic person, and to incite obligation.

They typically do not choose a child who is most like themselves, another narcissist, to be in the scapegoat role. 

So the chances of scapegoats helping to heal one another are greater than the chances that they will hurt each other ... with some exceptions, including the exception of scapegoats in ones own family, just because narcissistic families expect all children to be in competition with their siblings and other family members. 

Scapegoats grew up being "talked at" constantly too, in terms of "comparisons": "Your brother could walk when he was one years old! How come it took you until two years old to walk? I think we know the answer to that one!", or "I preferred your brother's company to yours. You were so glum and it came across as eternally ungrateful for the life I gave you," and so on. 

When the narcissistic parent talks to the golden child about the scapegoat it can sound like this: "You know, your sister drank that much soda and got to be too fat. Is that what you want for yourself?", "Why would you think it would be good enough to get a grade B in science when your sister got an A? We expect better from you!", "I always loved you more. But if you keep acting like that, you won't be any closer to my heart than your sister was."

It can be an every day occurrence in narcissistic families, and anyone who has grown up in a normal family without constant comparisons going on can thank their parents for never going down this road, that all the siblings were, more or less, treated as equals, treated with dignity and respect, treated with acceptance, and more importantly, treated with kindness and with love. Anyone can see that there is not much kindness and love in comparing children to each other day in and day out, through an entire childhood and way beyond it. 

What this means is that some scapegoats can still be in that "comparison competitive mindset" even when it feels much, much better to be out of it, even when it hurt them more than they could deal with when they were a child. The comparison mindset can be unconscious, subconscious or with total consciousness. It's always good to figure out which one it is when you are up against this sort of thing because it can foretell which way your relationships will go.

Competition, as bad as it felt for the scapegoat, could have been so pervasive in the early home that it took over how they thought about themselves and others, so that they never really felt connected to anyone, especially members who were touted as "better than" themselves.

Comparisons can do a lot of harm to your relationships. 

We'll take these few sentences again: "I can talk to the narcissist. They aren't my first choice in a person to share things with by a long shot. Truthfully, I don't really feel comfortable with them at all. But I can talk to them about some things if I'm really, really patient. Why can't you?" - you can see the comparisons pop up just in these couple of sentences, even with the empathy as an introduction to the lecture, that you are touting yourself as "more reasonable, more patient, more this or that" because you can "sort of" get along with a difficult person better than another scapegoat can.   

I bet your fellow scapegoat will either have a look of shock, or look dejected, or affronted. They will be backing away in some manner unless they are absurdly humble. And then that becomes an impediment to mutual respect, mutual support and mutual intimacy. It can create a kind of invisible wall of distrust. 

Hierarchies aren't built for connections. They are built to either raise your esteem, and self esteem, or to lower it. The person that gets to decide the hierarchy is, of course, the narcissist in most situations. Doing this sort of thing with a fellow scapegoat will feel like "narcissistic comparing" on some level -  triggering. 

For instance, scapegoats are often shunned. Having gotten to know many, many scapegoats, about 90 percent of them were shunned over the most ridiculous inconsequential reasons you can think of, as if the parents had to grapple at trying to find something, anything, to blame their child with just so they could shun. It reminded me of Jane Eyre's shunning by Mrs. Reed, though I'd say half of narcissistic parents shun for even more confusing, confounding reasons than Mrs. Reed did. At any rate, that part of the novel rang true to me, especially as it featured a golden child, and because it featured a hierarchy where Jane was on the bottom rung. 

Some shunnings are for totally made up reasons, excuses to get the child away from the family, and some of them are pure malice: "I wish I had aborted you when I had the chance!" and "I gave birth to you, and I can take it away!" are not uncommon in the world of scapegoating. 

Sounds like a family you want to belong to, right? 

I said that facetiously, of course. 

Some scapegoats feel relieved to be out of the family, and in that case, it can be easy to break the obnoxious comparison narratives and a mindset that you had to endure or carry within yourself. Other scapegoats who may miss some of the people in their family, but are also determined to get away from it, may find it difficult to separate on a psychological level, including the type of comparison thinking that narcissists indulge in, even if they realize the narcissist's type of thinking is deeply flawed, evil or hurtful.

Some of this is the result of being constantly manipulated with to adopt all of the narcissist's perspectives. Scapegoats can find themselves unable to know how to think because the goal posts constantly change according to what the narcissist wants to control at any given time.

For instance, let us say that you show up at your narcissistic mother's party. You show up with jeans and a tee shirt because that is what she told you to wear at the last three parties she held. Now she tells you, "Why would you show up at my party looking like that!? I mean, you should look a little more dignified, not like a perpetual teenager!" She never told you to show up in something different, but now she's embarrassed by your appearance and admonishes you. So the next party you ask her what to wear, and she says, "Wear what you want! I'm not your fashion designer!" and you show up looking a little more dressed up, like the guests at the last party, and she snaps at you when you walk in the door: "You've got to be kidding, right? Oh, my God, you're going to look so out of place!" - This is just one instance of changing goal posts, but many narcissists do this in many, many situations, more serious situations than this, and some narcissists do it in most of them.  

Another scene: A scapegoat was riding her bike on the side of the road and a car hits it, and she crashes into a ditch and the bike gets damaged. She walks home and her narcissistic father yells at her for "wrecking the bike".
     "Do you know how much that bicycle cost? Well, you're not getting another one! You obviously can't take care of your things! Why are you like this? Your brother never ruins anything!" - she always gets compared to her brother and consistently gets the negative judgements. "But not you! You leave your mittens at school! You tore your raincoat up when you smashed into that electric fence! And now this!" She tries to bring up the fact over and over again that she was hit by a car, that the accident doesn't make it her fault because a car was involved, and that she got banged up too, but he doesn't listen, ever (so common).
     The "changing of goal posts" would be this: Weeks later her Dad tells her that he's "had it!" and she needs a bike, and that she needs to get ready to go shopping for one now.
     Here's another changing of the goal posts. She assumes that the replacement bike will be like the bike she had when the other bike was ruined in the accident. When they get to the check-out counter, her father instructs them to put on training wheels because "she is not an athlete like her brother."
     And this folks, is also why children of narcissists can seem like they are crazy even when they are not. The parent can get into phases where changes are rapid-fire. They change ambitions, perspectives, ideas, plans, rages, apologies, and feelings on a whim, and not because of anything you say to them - they mostly ignore that. 

Scapegoats constantly wonder if a different perspective than the one the parent has will ever be respected, or even looked at. Not listening and deciding what is what is a lot of what narcissists are about because they don't trust anything or anyone other than their own beliefs. Reality simply does not exist for some of them; only their beliefs exist, or at least that is what they make known, especially to their children.

From all I have seen, scapegoats who want relationships outside the family know they cannot conduct themselves at all like they do inside the family. The competition thinking that narcissists keep requiring, especially when they want you to agree to and coddle their non-reality based beliefs, and the prejudices that go with the competition thinking that they have, as a scapegoat you know you have to give up comparisons when you relate to people outside of your narcissistic family, and comparative thinking between individuals, even if you place yourself second to everyone else in your family, if you are ever going to have a meaningful relationship outside the family. 

This is to say that most scapegoats know they have been manipulated, and separated from others via comparisons and untruthful smear campaigns to the point of feeling love starved (because they are judged so poorly in comparison), but some of them have been so indoctrinated as to not know how to stop comparing. And often their comparing can be self sabotaging, that they aren't "good enough" for anyone, that no "one will ever listen to what they have to say", let alone people who are open minded, affectionate, honest and loving. And some of it comes with the realization that their parents would not approve, or accept them at all if they saw their scapegoat with someone who was really kind, honest, faithful, good looking, caring, doting and loving, and God forbid, put them first, and was loyal to them (i.e. opposite from how the parent treated them in their original family of origin).

In fact, most scapegoats are aware that it's their parent's worst nightmare to have their scapegoats in a happy marriage, with a successful career, a lot of money, and with well adjusted children who are making a name for themselves in the world, and attribute it to the scapegoat's upbringing. In order to have any chance of a relationship with a parent, some scapegoats know they have to sabotage their own success and their good relationships, compare themselves to other people and appear to be wanting in the qualities others have, and adopt at least enough of the parent's narrative to be acceptable to a parent. That includes "comparing".

They also know that these parents soothe themselves with comparing, that they tell lies about other people, that they attribute all the successes that a scapegoat has to either themselves or something nefarious and criminal. For instance: "She lied to get that job!"  "She doesn't have a successful marriage! I bet that she's cheating every chance she gets." "Her children say nice things about her because she threatens them." "She appears well adjusted because everyone around her is trying to hide her insanity." "She can't be that successful. She's hiding something because if she was successful, she would move into a mansion." And so on. 

Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a psychologist and expert on narcissism, has said in her videos many times that this is all projection on the narcissist's part, that scapegoating is basically the narcissist's own worst qualities put on to someone else. Jay Reid, a psychotherapist, has remarked a number of times in his videos that the family does not know the scapegoat. The family has been too busy scapegoating to get to know the scapegoat.

And that boils down to why narcissists are not in touch with reality; they put acting on something before getting to know what is going on, and ruminating about it afterwards to come up with the best outcome. 

Knowing that, in many instances if a scapegoat wants to continue a relationship with a parent, they have to be willing never to confront the competition, the lying and assumptions, the sabotaging, and smear campaigns the narcissistic parent spreads about them. 

I know very few scapegoats who want that, who are willing to fight their way back into their family, knowing these sets of circumstances are waiting for them. Peep's family seems to be the exception, and maybe it is because the older scapegoats in that family set a precedent, that you have to accept your lot in life, and the role the family has given you. No, you don't, but maybe the advent of more alleged psychopathy in that family frightened enough of them to submit.

This is to say that scapegoats can mess up their relationships with other scapegoats when they aren't fully committed to being healed and accepting of their fate as being "total outsiders", when their mind is still back with the family. Some of those thoughts can be about how to get re-entry into some family members' lives. But sometimes it is not possible because narcissistic families are cult-like and narcissists lecture their family members constantly, and expect the narcissist's perspectives to be repeated constantly by its members.

Part of those lectures include expecting others to adopt the shunning of scapegoats too, and trying very hard to get all members to hate their scapegoats. The pressure to hate can be so pervasive and constant that some members feel ground down by it, and give in just to get the narcissist off their back. 

A lot of it also has to do with coercion, using money and rewards, fear, and guilt trips, and "you owe me!" pronouncements, i.e. obligation to the narcissist's power.

I think when we scapegoats do get into a loving relationship with a loyal mate who treats us well, and protects us from abuse, and we are no longer love starved, we face rejection from our parent(s). I have talked about narcissistic parents ruining weddings before (almost a given for a scapegoat), and they especially sabotage weddings where they aren't the focal point, and where they can't control the guest lists, and where they think their own marriage is not going as well as their child's, and where a scapegoat is actually loved! - horror of all horrors to a family who enjoys blaming and hurting the scapegoat whenever they need a fall guy! - which is usually forever if the scapegoat doesn't escape.

In the world of scapegoats, instead of sabotage, we often get a wedding where the parent doesn't show up to it instead. Some of those parents can talk other family members into not attending either. "If you go to that wedding, you'll be hurting me, and believe me, you don't want to be doing that or there will be dire consequences!" - the threats come out. Very common. 

I also have observed that when we scapegoats do find a fulfilling career that our narcissistic parent might envy, we get rejected over that too. If a scapegoat is good looking and well dressed - that's another problem for narcissistic parents. Winning awards is another problem. Having more money than they do - another problem. They can hate us all they want for getting further and further from the down-trodden scapegoat role, but if you have enough good things in your life and the parent only wants you back because they HAVE TO HAVE a scapegoat, why would we want to go back? 

So knowing this, they often hoover, and then try like the dickens to sabotage us any way they think will create misery for us. Usually that's a smear campaign for most narcissists. However, malignant narcissists can go further and talk to our boss, sleep with our marriage partner, agree to babysit our kids while talking trash about us to them, steal, get into criminal mischief, home invasions, stalking and other crimes - and often it's hard to tell if they are the malignant brand until the crimes start happening. 

Anyway, the reason for this section is to explain that most scapegoats who hurt other scapegoats can do so by falling into "the comparison trap". They haven't grown out of it yet. They haven't decided to drop that horrible legacy. It is still ingrained in the way they think because of the pervasiveness of comparing one family member to another. If there is any contact with the family, that can exacerbate the compulsion to compare.

They may realize over time that comparing people is a blockage to fulfilling relationships, and it is, but until that realization dawns on them in a significant enough way, they may keep doing it, at least for awhile. 

The other thing that many scapegoats take with them from the family are unsolicited advice and commands, not that most of them do it because they know that they wince when they get it from family members, especially family members who have proven over and over that their advice and commands are not for their benefit at all; it is only for the benefit of the parent and keeping you in the role they have assigned you.

However, I do think the "you should" statements are the exception. "You should put your money into this stock. You'll make a lot of money that way." "You shouldn't leave so soon." "You should try to hire this musician. He's so good and he needs the work." "You shouldn't talk to Dad. You know how he is." - and so on. 

The "you shoulds" are almost daily faire in narcissistic families, and in some sociopathic families too, though there are more commands than "you shoulds" in sociopathic families, a lot more rigidity in terms of expectations of service to the family.

While scapegoats say "You should --" quite a lot less than other family members because the "you shoulds" are mostly directed at scapegoats, let's face it, they can find themselves saying it in other situations unconsciously, or barely conscious they are doing it until they get a reaction. 

I have made that mistake myself in relationships that were exceptionally non-narcissistic, relationships that were profoundly empathetic. And it was only when I saw the reaction that I said to myself, "You stepped on a boundary. Don't do that! You can see the wincing, the same as when it was done to you."

I also noticed that people are a lot less open to hearing you when you say any "you shoulds".

I stopped the "you shoulds" and the result is a lot more closeness. And I have come to look at "you shoulds" as unnecessary, as "pushy", as invasive (not grossly invasive, by any means), but they really don't achieve things in a good way, not in close personal relationships. 

And another thing I discovered is that advice should be worded when the person asks for advice (an extremely important distinction here!), as "Maybe you could look at it this way? ... Maybe it calls for __________ kind of action? What do you think?" - always putting it back to their thinking it through rather than as your idea. The "maybe" part of it makes it more of their idea, about them gaining the skills of solving hard interpersonal issues, and knowing that it was their decision rather than your imposed "you should".  

At this point in my life I'm always striving to be more empathetic, to have more closeness in my life, to listen more carefully, to have greater understanding, to gain a lot more knowledge about how inter-relationship issues can be solved effectively without any narcissistic tactics what-so-ever, which is one reason I don't want narcissists in my life, or even in my work life, any more. It's like dealing with bulls in a china shop when everyone else is trying not to break the china. 

The china in this analogy is the relationship, and in having a relationship, you toast to your dear friend by clinging the thin porcelain cups together without breaking each other's cups. You are sensitive to each other. You preserve the relationship at all cost. You are whole. They are whole. There are no wounds between you. 

Narcissists never preserve relationships like this. They come in like a bull and ruin them. Everything has a chip in it, and every family member has chips and cracks - they put getting their own way above any and all relationships. 

And you can see that because an agenda comes first, the fulfillment of the agenda comes first before the relationship does too. Very pitiable. 

A lot of us get angry and disgusted when the specter of "I have to get my own way, so I'll punish" tactic of narcissists becomes apparent again and again. But really, it is more pitiable and sad than provoking. They never experience intimacy ever. They never experience the joy of not breaking people and relationships. They never experience the joy of mending relationships in a way that works. They never experience the joy of compromise (the apex of that would be playing music where every musician and their talents are taken into consideration at all times). They never experience the joy of giving up on the "you shoulds" that drive intimacy away. They've never experienced what scapegoats eventually come to experience when they leave the family to find real love, ever. 

Empathy is a valued quality for most of us; it's what scapegoats are particularly starved of all through childhood even as they are taught to have huge amounts of empathy for the slightest tiniest wounds and the "princess and the pea" feelings of narcissists. 

When they are adults, scapegoats deserve the kind of empathy they gave and never received in childhood. They deserve "being mattered" for once in their lives. They deserve the best kinds of relationships and connections having lived through the worst. When they find that empathy, they don't want to destroy it. So I would say to any scapegoat, it really does mean dropping the "you shoulds" even if you say it with the best of intentions, if we don't want that wince, or see a jolt backwards from the other person we are relating to. In order to move forward into experiences that are continually fulfilling and enlightening it requires being sensitive even to wincing. 

And instead of the "you shoulds", maybe the practice of understanding what they are going through on all levels, is what is required.

For instance, I have a friend in my life right now who is living through a traumatic situation. It's pretty clear she is trying to come up with solutions, but I decided to skip over suggesting possible solutions. I started asking about "symptoms" instead. And sure enough, she has symptoms of trauma. Then instead of advice, I'd ask questions like, "Do you feel better when you leave and go work and do your own thing? Do the symptoms abate somewhat?" And that had her leaving the situation more and more. To her it was still untenable and unbearable, as she returned to it every day, albeit for shorter periods of time, but the important part of this information she received from me is that all of her symptoms were trauma-related, and she could find them all by looking them up and reading about them, one by one. It put her in touch with her own body and mind, giving her a lot of insight about what she could take in terms of those symptoms, and what she couldn't take, and how to tell when those symptoms got worse, and what the trigger was for them getting worse. For me, it was better than any "you should" statement or suggestion I could ever have made. 

Likewise Peep started asking me many questions after a long e-mail to her about a situation that I wasn't handling well, didn't know what to do with, although I knew that my symptoms were trying to tell me something, but I didn't know what. Was I just triggered by past events? Or was there something in the present relationship that I wasn't looking at right? I was "freaking out", for lack of a better word,  to the point where I wasn't "thinking straight". Her questions put me on the right track. They were so helpful. She also told me of similar experiences she lived through and that made a huge difference too. And she collects resources.

Peep and I talk about scapegoating a lot. Scapegoats who are educated, who read and write a lot, seem especially enlightened about interpersonal matters, and her marriage, like mine, is a happy one, so she knows what makes and breaks relationships through experiences. 

The third thing that scapegoats can take with them is assuming people have given up on relationships with them. Scapegoats were given up on over and over and over again in childhood and often way beyond that if they still had a relationship with their rejecting parent in adulthood, and they can assume that other people have given up on them even when they haven't. They assume someone wants to ghost them or give them the silent treatment when the other person has actually been in an accident and are in the hospital instead. 

Scapegoats may have to be reminded over and over again that they are not actually being abandoned, that "something else" is going on instead. 

Abandonment is especially a big "alarm bell" for scapegoats, and the way trauma works is to give a scapegoat symptoms when something similar appears to be going on (called triggers), so that they will avoid a person who is abandoning and cruel. Only a likeness, or "like situation" needs to happen in order to get triggered. Symptoms exist to keep you from going back to situations that hurt you, in order to preserve you. People who hurt you will cause you to get PTSD eventually. 

What I need to say about abandonment needs to be clarified. Abandoning a child is not just leaving them to fend for themselves. It can mean not protecting them against bullying. It means not listening to them any more (in essence, the child's voice is virtually "turned off" - very common in narcissistic families to the point where a child feels mostly invisible - it's a major part of scapegoating a child too). It means abandoning them in terms of their need for connection or conversation, even with other people who are part of the family. It means abandoning them in terms of affection, safety and love. It means abandoning their health or mental health (not caring). It can mean abandoning them to a person who is either exploitive or abusive (like insisting they have a relationship with a step-parent who treats them like Cinderella, or who sexually abuses them, or insults them constantly) - that's just one instant. It can mean abandoning them by putting them outside every day until supper or bedtime and let the consequences of what happens to them play out (children without much, if any, supervision, tend to be exploited). It can mean abandoning them to live in their own special unit (like an unheated cabin or barn on the property) until they can "behave themselves" - more common than what you'd think. It can mean abandoning them to another home, or hospital, or orphanage even when they had a parent who was capable of taking care of them, but were too addicted, or running around having affairs, or too self involved to care. It can mean abandoning them for a new marriage partner. A lot of scapegoats experience abandonments on so many different levels, and some are taught that they deserve to be abandoned over and over again, that some of them assume abandonments, even cruel ones, even ones that make no sense at all to them, "are part of life". So they can give up on people when an abandonment isn't even taking place, when they get "triggered". 

So scapegoats can give up on relationships or become incommunicative introverted wallflowers who are very quiet and appear to have nothing to say in the midst of an argument. Since arguments with narcissists lead to abandonments, they expect to be abandoned when there are arguments with anyone, or even when they merely hear arguments. They equate disagreements and arguments with destructive outcomes, always. 

Some of them tell themselves that peace has to come before disagreements, so they can go quiet, and refuse to talk (because they used to be shouted down when they talked), when something just needs to be hammered out to find a solution.

It takes a lot of patience on the part of others, as well as continued affection and love, for scapegoats to get the idea that most people do not abandon other people, that stability is actually a sought-after set of qualities that most people want in their relationships. That can sometimes surprise scapegoats, because scapegoats assume narcissists get a lot out of making everything unstable and rocky, and tossing people aside. Scapegoats assume that their own big desires for peace and stability are an anomaly, that no one else wants that except them, and that they can never expect it in any relationship, ever, especially when they are a child, and even later if they haven't made a significant break with their family.

They may not know, for instance, that they are valued when another person is distracted, for instance. They might assume they will have to "make it on their own very soon" if the other person is not totally in the present with them, and they may spend a lot of time trying to figure out the logistics of being tossed out, thereby not living in the present either, causing a lack of intimacy for both people. 

The fourth issue where scapegoats can hurt each other, even if they have both been abandoned, is if one scapegoat still wants to be part of his or her family unit still, and is doing everything he or she can to be accepted back in, especially the part of the family unit with the narcissists.

Or they might want rewards from the narcissist, which is never a good sign. Wanting rewards from a narcissist is about "manipulating and using people", and we know that there are plenty of people who would abandon a narcissist in a second if that narcissist didn't have money or rewards of any kind - not a good sign in a scapegoat as it can point to co-narcissism. As I've said before, the scapegoat is the least likely to be narcissistic, but it doesn't preclude it from happening. 

It's actually the scapegoats from wealthy family members who leave and never expect anything, are the ones whom I trust the most, and who I feel at ease to be myself with the most.  

Re-entry into an abusive family, means, on some level, condoning the abuse. Or it's white-washing it. It's accepting it on some level. Granted there are desperate homeless scapegoats who end up going back, and I suppose that can be excused to some degree if they don't use their accepted "status", and don't adopt some narcissistic traits and perspectives to hurt other scapegoats.  

When I'm around those scapegoats who want to go back to their family, I do get headaches, mild ones. Not as much as narcissists by a long shot, but enough to pay attention to. 

To my way of thinking, it's especially concerning when another scapegoat who wants re-entry is in the same family you are in. I would say, once they are on that track it's wise to consider whether they can be trusted. In that case, these are the questions you might want to be asking:

* Are they excusing the abuse of the narcissist?

* Are they telling you that the narcissist is not that bad, or are they saying that a lot of relationships are like it, or are they comparing how they relate to the narcissist to how you relate to the narcissist? 

* Are they suddenly turning on you, as though "the rift" is evenly attributed in terms of fault between you and your parent, for instance, where you were thrown out, even when you bring up an extreme "power differential" that makes it clear you were thrown out by the fact that they wanted you to be in a submissive role, or taking a member's abuse, or where they wanted to command what you did, said, where you went, and so on?

* Are they indulging in toxic positivity, where they are telling you to "get over it!" or "leave the past behind!" or saying a lot of "you shoulds", just like the narcissists in your family did, or saying "your parent doesn't know any better", or "You need to see the positives in your parent; every person has a light within them", especially if there is absolutely no empathy behind it for you. And this is especially concerning: Are they telling you that they don't want to hear any more details about your struggles in "making it on your own" or dealing with some left over "lingering hurts"? If you are in poverty, do they ignore you, or that part of your life? Do they act like they don't want to hear it? In other words, are they abandoning you just like the narcissist did in hearing what you have to say? - I would say this is one of the worst signs of all, and toxic positivity makes it even worse still. 

* Is this fellow scapegoat suddenly acting flippant about the smear campaigns of your narcissist parent - like they are accepting some of it, and even condoning some of the negativity and known lies of the narcissist, whereas before they did not? 

* Are they suddenly preferring the company of narcissists instead of the scapegoats? 

* Are they talking about what they "got" from the narcissist? 

* Are they suddenly putting the narcissist on a pedestal? 

* Are they hanging out with the narcissist to hurt another person? 

* Are they telling you, knowing of the abuse you went through, to go back to the narcissist and make up? To forgive and forget? That it's the necessary thing to do to bring healing to both of you?

* Are they telling you that they didn't like the life of the outcast scapegoat, and preferred the family even though they are still abused in it, and that they are "trying to work it out" or "make it work", and that you "should" too? 

* Are they telling you that the narcissist isn't that bad? That there are people who are worse than they are, like ______xxx________ family member? 

* Have they suddenly ghosted you and never gave you an explanation as to why? 

* Have they said, after so many years of sharing, "I'm not sure I want a relationship with you"? - and you don't know why? 

* Do they seem more concerned with what the narcissist thinks of them than being in a relationship with you, than in deciding who they have relationships with is their right and privilege, and not the narcissist's decision? 

* Are they afraid of not receiving the narcissist's "rewards" if they are in a relationship with you? - again, my own alarm bells go off when this is part of the picture. You'll have to decide for yourself whether they do for you too.

* Are they afraid of the narcissist's "wrath" if they are in a relationship with you? - this one may not be as bad as the previous one, but it is placing the narcissist's feelings first, something to always consider. Part of the family legacy is to always put the narcissist's feelings first, always, even if you have to ignore the much more dire circumstances, and much more "real" feelings of other family members. 

* Is this scapegoat afraid they will never be admitted back into the family if they are in a relationship with you? - this one says they are still more invested in the narcissist's mind trap than in healing, and in talking to you, and gaining perspective into what it is like being a scapegoat - also not a good sign, for you or for them, in my book.     

* Do you feel like you are being brought back to an old learning experience, when you are talking to them? Are the old lessons, old anger management issues, and everything else that goes with a narcissistic family still being talked about because they are still there? Do they expect you to help them deal with it "until they can escape" - even though they have never attempted an escape and it's, again, been decades in the making? Do they call up crying because of the next abuse they've been through?
     Sometimes in these situations all you can contribute is listening, because if they haven't "graduated" past being stuck in an abusive relationship, even when it's gone on for decades or a life time; they still believe, on some level, they can do something where family members will care about each other rather than be in competition with each other. 
     Even though these kinds of people are usually not a trust issue, I still find myself getting headaches around them. I haven't really explored why.
     The people who are dealing with this are exhausting to talk to because they indulge in circular conversations: "I'm going to leave", followed by "It's a lot to give up. Don't you think people can change?" When I say no, it's been going on for decades, they try to prove to me wrong. The lecturing and anecdotes about this go on for a long time, and that's when I get a headache. And then at they end they say, "I think I have to give this some more thought and some different kinds of experiments. I'm going to try ___________________." And at that point I'm just listening, not contributing. 

There may be other situations I may add, as they come up.

a warning when it comes to other family scapegoats from your own family (aside from what I have stated before):

Narcissists don't like scapegoats from the extended family talking to one another. It makes them very, very nervous, and panicked, feeling like they are losing control, especially of the narrative, and the perspectives they want every family member to have (yes, they are even controlling to this level).

That is when they get into "reward mode". All of a sudden they will be ingratiating themselves to you. They'll be sending you money or birthday cards when they didn't before. They'll be inviting you to family events where they didn't before. They will be telling you they made a big mistake of abandoning you after years and years of the silent treatment. They will say they missed you a lot when they barely registered that you were alive before. They will be a little too sweet.  

This is called hoovering by the way. Hoovering is different than a genuine reconciliation, or a genuine apology in that they still have cruel Narcissistic Personality Disorder traits and tendencies. What this means is they haven't changed, in the way they perceive things, or in the reasons for why they are in relationships in the first place (to get rewarded via narcissistic supply, and for narcissists with sociopathic traits, narcissistic supply, greater power, greater domination, getting their own way chronically, slaves, money, material things all at the expense of others). 

They haven't rehabilitated themselves. They haven't done the Twelve Steps. They haven't gone to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. They haven't gone to anger management classes. They haven't stopped lying. They haven't stopped the smear campaigns. They are still blaming other people, setting up conspiracy theories that people are trying to rig something, and playing the victim. They haven't tried one iota to change their behavior. They have just waited, and waited, and waited for their scapegoats to be vulnerable, desperate, and willing to do just about anything to end their plight. It is about getting them trauma bonded again. 

This changes a bit when they are having a panic attack about all of these scapegoats talking about the family, and what they experienced, and the abuse they endured, and the family history of estrangements, disapproval, shunning, and abuse, and laughing about the fact that they were all called "crazy" ("Yea, crazy for not following orders!") and all of the expectations they had of us being ultra submissive when they can't do it themselves. There is talk about being told what we should be doing at all times in our life when they can't even follow ethical codes of conduct like being polite. 

It's wonderful to commiserate with other scapegoats. It's great. It's very healing. It's like being in a union where you have each other's back and feeling you can go on strike even as the narcissistic bully continues to try to lord it over all of you.

But family scapegoating tends to be through the "extended family" in this way: each family usually only has one scapegoat, two at the most, unless it is one of those families where children went "no contact" one by one, and I do know some of those. So, the union of scapegoats tends to be among cousins, and maybe a nephew or niece, or an aunt. It can be between sisters too. And this can be problematic. The narcissists in their panic will be hoovering some of them back. 

Hoovering sends up immediate alarm bells in my system (I don't know about you). But for me, I don't just get the "knowing" headache. I feel sick to my stomach. I feel like I can't breathe. Once I can calm down, I call them out on not being genuine. I call them out on all of the insults they indulge in (it's simply not possible that changed overnight). I call them out on the times they ignored me when I was going through an illness, when they decided to carry their agenda even into those dire issues (I don't believe in a sudden about-face that they suddenly care about my health either - very suspicious). I call them out on their total lack of empathy and ethics (which doesn't take any speculation on my part - they know as well as I do that they lack both). Then they become enraged and decide that they need to pick someone "easier" in the pool of scapegoats.

Narcissists are total wimps when it comes to working on relationships. "I can't do it! It's too hard!" And they are also too entitled: "Everyone owes me! Everyone has to do what I want!" They sit back and wait for your cues so they can take some sort of an action which helps them to look better to you or to their entourage. ("I'm only sorry over nothing that's important!" - yup, wimpy). 

In fact one of the reasons narcissists typically don't do much of anything to mend or to help to mend their relationships, and purposely leave you high and dry, and try to get other family members to reject you too, is not just to punish you for your independence and your independent decisions, it is meant to achieve another goal: to get you as vulnerable as they possibly can. They want you desperate, impoverished, down on your luck, no one helping you in the emergency room, even homeless, so that if you do "go back", everything is on their terms again, they get to call all of the shots because of your terrible condition, so that they can wipe out your independence, wipe out your goals and happiness, wipe out any kind of love and compassion from other people that you might have, so that all you have left is to live in is their narcissistic hell, and scapegoat you in a way that punishes you more, and worse than you were before. 

It is like women who have endured domestic violence and "go back" to their abusers. The abuse gets so much worse, more hospital visits, more isolation, more punishment for having left, more punishment if the abuser thinks you are planning to leave again, worse symptoms, even when you've been sweet-talked into going back. 

Hoovering always comes with sweet talk. And the sweeter it is, and the more consistent the love bombing is (usually over years for scapegoats), the more it tends to erode away your distrust, unless you are very, very aware of the narcissist's game plans.

When family scapegoats are hoovered, it's not much different than the domestic violence offenders, or it can be exactly like it. It tends to be more emotional abuse than physical abuse, but if a member feels they can get away with physical abuse, you get that too. And again, that family member is usually bigger, stronger, a male against a female, and is higher on the hierarchy in society as well as in the family. 

So the way it happens is this way: the narcissists reach inside the scapegoat group to those who are more vulnerable to sweet talk, to manipulation, who are vulnerable to being rewarded, who are younger, and they may even ply them with money (i.e. "buy them off"). They will examine carefully each scapegoat's weakness: Is the scapegoat less ethical and likely to throw another scapegoat under the bus? Is the scapegoat sick, impoverished, or so down on their luck that they are vulnerable to being manipulated with money? What will work to get them "in line", serving the narcissist(s) instead of the family scapegoats? How many of these scapegoats can give up their empathy and reject other scapegoats for money, rewards, and sweet talk? - that's the agenda. 

God help us all for our vulnerabilities. It doesn't mean the most vulnerable scapegoats are narcissists, or even nefarious, even the ones who may have a couple of narcissistic traits here and there. But after they "give in" to the hoovering, they become a lot more vulnerable to the narcissist's mind games, the narcissist manipulating them to believe in conspiracies, manipulating them to believe in the narcissist(s) fake victim stories just because they are receiving something from the narcissist that they may have always wanted. 

In return these scapegoats can become more vulnerable to doing the narcissist's bidding too, their dirty work including hurting other scapegoats, or anyone the narcissist(s) want to attack. - I have seen it too many times. 

Scapegoats who seemed to have all of the morals in the world can all of a sudden put the rewards first and stop thinking about what scapegoating did to them or to you. They have become comfortable, conveniently numb, or fulfilled enough to let their morals go. Or it is done to keep themselves out of poverty, or to get much needed medical attention, or to get help sending their child to college.

However, everyone who has been abused in the family system and been rewarded by the family to keep scapegoats from talking to each other, can eventually become sacrificed again. One reason why narcissists don't really like keeping a scapegoat around, is that the scapegoat reminds them constantly, just by their existence alone, that they, the narcissist, is abusive. They see the scapegoat as a threat to their reputation in terms of the abuse they commit. That's why they never, ever admit to being abusive.

Which has the result of making narcissists more unethical. Then they have to cover up that so that they don't "appear" that way either. And while the ethics go down, down, down, they don't stop abusing. They get away with their abuses by being unethical, or they discard us as a way to "get rid of what they've done".  

I've never seen a situation where scapegoats "gave in" to the family scapegoating role, including all of the unethical ugliness floating around, and come out of it by being loved and valued over the long term. It can take years for a narcissist to blow their top again, but it will happen. These "gone back scapegoats" keep thinking they will be loved again if they work hard enough for it, but end up with more severe neglect and often more abuse than they did the last time. The parent can act sweet for awhile, but the major flaw of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is that they can't deal with shame without raging, so they insert a little control here and there with the "gone back" scapegoat. Eventually the narcissist asserts more control, and then a lot of control. After that, the micro-managing comes back into play, until there is full-out abuse again. It is what old age was like for Peep's Aunt Scapegoat who seems to have had no more fight left in her to protect herself or Peep, or any other member being scapegoated, other than to accept her fate. 

This is to say that fellow scapegoats can go "unempathetic on you" when they are in the family again, more unfeeling, more lecturing (telling you to go back to the narcissist to tough it out the way they have, or tell you that the narcissist has changed and is "a lot more sweet now", or agree with what you are saying, but that "you need to get over it" because they can't be bothered thinking about any more about the plight of scapegoats - "it's so yesterday for me!"). You can have so many of the same symptoms you had with narcissists, even though it's being around your fellow scapegoat that seems to be causing the symptoms.

For scapegoats who remain outside the family system, unfortunately dealing with a scapegoat who has caved in to narcissistic pressure via hoovering, love bombing and being paid off, can feel like being around another narcissist. 

We're used to the uncaring actions of narcissists and sociopaths and expect it, so in a lot of ways we're more on guard than with a fellow scapegoat. Narcissists are going to be arrogant. They're going to be above it all, telling every living being what to do and what to say, and even what to wear on some occasions. They're going to expect you to tough everything out. Some of us are even used to calling "B.S." on their acting and false personas, and their Jekyll and Hyde behaviors, and their uppity self serving actions, calling them out even on their cover ups for the sake of a sham of a reputation, and so on. Antagonism is always present when you are with, or around, narcissists.  

When a much sweeter scapegoat tells you to toughen up and go back to that, it is shocking, and it can send your system into shock. You wonder if you got them wrong. And it also feels like dealing with another narcissist because it can be sudden: first you were commiserating together, and sharing really deep things, and your ability to trust was really "opened". When a scapegoat who has been hurt over so many of the same things you have been hurt over, suddenly acts like they don't care if they got hurt ("I'm over it now" - because they got hoovered by a narcissist), your body and brain can feel like a five alarm fire. You're not gong to feel well at all. 

This is to say that they can get fleas (a psychology term meaning they temporarily adopt some narcissistic traits to cope with an antagonistic, narcissistic family system). It's real, and it's something to be wary of for this reason: 

Even though we tend to lose these former "nice scapegoats" who understood what we went through so well and so compassionately, we know that the more vulnerable a scapegoat they are, the more pressures they are living through (financial hardship, illness, end-of-life, and so on), the more that the narcissist can entrap them. In return for helping the scapegoat, the narcissist will want something from them, like telling them everything they want to know about all of the deep conversations they had with other scapegoats including things you never wanted repeated to a narcissist. It goes without saying that the narcissist will want total blind loyalty, for their scapegoat to "go back" to self sabotaging sycophantry, like being totally submissive to anything and everything the narcissist wants. A lot of narcissists give the minimum amount of help, and then threaten the scapegoat that if they don't pony up with blind loyalty and being a robot to be ordered around incessantly, the narcissist will retaliate.

Some scapegoats will go down the loyalty road, as Peep's Aunt Scapegoat did, beating themselves up, and letting themselves get beat up for the help they received. They become martyrs for the narcissist and the family just because they got help, or because they wanted the narcissist's help in a medical situation, or they wanted the narcissist's money. They may even be willing to let the narcissist call them an "it" or a "nothing", or "ungrateful" or "totally crazy" for those rewards, the common things that narcissists use in insults and in smear campaigns. 

Other scapegoats will be flagellating themselves in a different way, upset with themselves for falling for the narcissist's hoover again, when they knew what the end result would always be (more abuse, more shunning, more neglect, more cruelty). They too, may be willing to let the narcissist call them an "it" or a "nothing", or "ungrateful" or "totally crazy" without a single word or look backwards, trying to find contentment, finally, in their own independent life away from the family. 

We know we do not have to feel grateful for being abused, but some scapegoats really will feel that they have to be grateful for a year or two of help, and put up with 20 years of abuse for that help, as hard as it is to believe. 

I think adult scapegoats know, or eventually realize, that most families don't put their members through this, but narcissistic families expect huge, huge recompenses that are from a member whom they rejected, who they took back for a period to help them, with a lot of caveats. "I picked you up when you were down!" - even though they largely contributed to the scapegoat being down, "You owe me big!!!" - screaming into the scapegoat's face from six inches away. 

All narcissists and sociopathic people with power expect to be rewarded, worshipped, given special treatments and entitlements to hurt other people whom they have helped in the past. Just about anyone with the slightest bit of empathy can see that being scapegoated is not a good trade for being temporarily helped. 

Most scapegoats will not be able to handle rounds of abuses even if they are "helped" by a narcissist. Narcissists will typically have a lot of internal tension at forcing themselves to be consistently peaceful for a scapegoat with PTSD, or calm and reasonable in any personal relationship, and the chances of going completely all-out abusive with a scapegoat is high, very high, sending that scapegoat out of orbit again, whereby the scapegoat may very well be commiserating with other scapegoats once again. 

The statistics for "going back" for women in domestic violence relationships is seven times before making her final exit.

For adult family scapegoats, I would put that figure at two times. There are no statistics when it comes to scapegoats, but that is what I see.

I think the reason for two times is that the parent/child relationship isn't as close a bond as between intimate partners, and children leaving home is not an anomaly. Adult children also have an easier time going low contact to see if they really want to be in the relationship at all before they do the total break as compared to domestic violence victims. And children are meant to leave, maybe not altogether to the point of "no contact" for the rest of their lives, but enough to be independent. 

If abuse can't inspire a scapegoat to be independent, I don't know what will. 

Also statistically adult children generally are not the ones to initiate reconciliations with their parents. When the child is estranged, if there is a reconciliation, 80 - 85 percent of parents initiate the reconciliations, and only 15 - 20 percent of adult children initiate the reconciliations depending on which research article you read. If the parents are narcissistic, I would bet that even more parents are the initial initiators only because narcissists are control freaks, insisting they lead the way, and get their own way in all or most interactions with their children.  For instance, I can't see this kind of situation that this link points to with a narcissistic parent. 

Otherwise I'm not sure as to why those statistics are like that, but I would guess that overwhelmingly therapists and counselors tell parents they have to initiate reconciliation if they want their children back (with these rules).

Also therapists and counselors strongly suggest estrangement ("no contact") for adult children who are being abused or bullied, and even more so if the adult child/client has been diagnosed with PTSD, or is an obvious family scapegoat. It may also have to do with the power differential.

However, if you are an adult child and you do not feel loved, seen or heard by your parent, you're not going to want to be with your parent, or show up at any of their invites. 

There is a feeling of less obligation to parents these days anyway, especially if the parent is controlling, abusive, compromise-resistant, terrible at listening, mostly lacking in empathy and personal resolution skills, and using you too as their convenient scapegoat. There is a societal trend in estrangements which makes it easier and societally more acceptable for adult children to back away from a parent, and to go "no contact", especially when there is a history of abuse, abandonments, familial prejudices, intimidation, threats, and gross instability. 

There is a lot less shaming going on to get scapegoats to reconcile with their parents besides, not that it ever worked any way. With the older generation, the attitude was: "What did the child ever do to make a parent reject them?" With the newest generations, the general attitude is: "What did the parent do to ever make a child not want to have contact with their parent again?" 

I would even say that "the script has switched", done a 180 degrees. I heard the first signs of it in a hospital where an older person was blamed for having estranged family members. The person blaming her was a young nurse. 

As far as fellow scapegoats go, the relationship does take a bit of a "hit" when a fellow scapegoat "goes back" and sounds like a bit of a narcissist, or when they go back and they aren't doing well but think you should be trying to get along with difficult people too, and even a fellow scapegoat who still "wants to go back" but doesn't know how to traverse the bullying.

I think the reason is because this "going back" means you are not dealing with the same issues together, the way you used to. 

Their issue is going to be about "how to get along with the narcissist". Your issue is going to be about "how to get along without the narcissist", how to heal, how to successfully navigate your own life without them in it, how to invest your time in relationships where your levels of empathy, respect and ethics match with the other person so that you don't go through this again.

If it's your own abusive family member they go back to, or even if the abuser has love bombed to break up "the scapegoat healing group" (the more likely scenario), the anxiety levels go up considerably for most of us who don't want that same narcissist back in our life. We don't want to make up; we don't want to be manipulated; we don't want to hear about how "changed the narcissist is" because we don't believe it, and haven't seen any change for years, decades, or a life time. We are tired of feeling perpetually confused as to how to act around their moods and have given up on it, even though many of us don't judge people for trying. We are tired of them insisting in every situation that nothing is ever their fault. We are tired of  their broken promises, their fake personas, their jekyll/hyde behavior, their lack of empathy and warmth, their lack of ethics, their trash-talking about other people, and being manipulative. After awhile we may be tired of hearing how this scapegoat has tried x, y, and z to get along with their abuser, and what worked, and what didn't work, all of the endless trials to make it work, or how wonderful it is that they are being loved bombed all of a sudden, without explanation, as if the abuser is panicked and must prove something, after years and years of abuse and contempt. Most scapegoats who see no other way other than to go "no contact" have had to endure several lifetimes worth of dealing with these narcissistic traits, plus lots of gaslighting and projection, and boggling double standards, plus all of the trauma, and a lot of us don't, or can't deal with any more of it. 

As I've written in other posts, whether we can deal with it or not is largely decided by how much past trauma we've had, how much abuse we've received from the narcissist, how ill or disabled we are, how ill or disabled we were after their abuses, if our self esteem was trashed by them, whether we have trauma symptoms around them or other narcissists, and how much help we have received, including therapy, in dealing with our traumas over our lifetimes. 

For those scapegoats who are "sick and tired of being sick and tired", and have had emotional abuse, physical abuse, and physical intimidation (intimidation meaning shouting at you in close range, not letting you pass through when you want to leave, roughing you up, and so on), and went through physical symptoms from trauma that took years and years, and lots of therapy and money to recover from, they are going to be much more resistant to going back than members who weren't abused as badly. Some physical issues from trauma cannot be recovered from, no matter how much therapy you receive and no matter how many EMDR sessions you have, and you can end up with chronic unfixable conditions, something that Peep and I both have had to deal with.

So we may back off a little from the "gone back to my abuser" type of scapegoat, and not be as trusting, even if we may have empathy for their plight. It doesn't mean we don't want them in our life, but navigating what we should not say to them, especially if they are a conduit for the narcissist in terms of telling them information about us, is very, very difficult. Should we say we are fine (which could mean stalking from a narcissist because typically they want their scapegoats NOT to be fine), or do we say we are going through some issues (which can mean the narcissist is happy and will leave you alone ... but they might constantly be grilling the conduit to see if we are recovering from our issues or not, and if we do recover, again it can mean some hoovering, or stalking, so that they can mess up our lives again).

It can be scary to talk to family scapegoats who have "gone back". We often don't know what to reveal and what not to reveal and it can make us an "anxious mess". On the other hand, we don't know what to say if they are going through a devaluation period with the narcissist again, because we don't know how much information they will take back to the narcissist, and where the narcissist can claim it is our fault for turning people away from them.

Either way, our advice, if they ask us for it, is not going to be "Stay with the narcissist! You'll be fine! Everything will work out and be so good!" It's going to sound more like "Stay with them if you like trauma bonds." 

If that former scapegoat is truly on even footing this time around with the narcissist, with the same financial status as the narcissist, not being controlled, not being enmeshed, not enduring lectures, not enduring commands, not parentified or infantilized, never gaslighted, never undergoing perspecticide, never expected to have the same perspectives of the narcissist, there is less likelihood of a trauma bond, but this is incredibly rare for a former scapegoat, and narcissists are not comfortable treating any scapegoat as an equal. 

So this "going back" type of scapegoat is very likely to be going through what they did before with the narcissist, only much worse. 

Even so, after many, many years, those fellow scapegoats can ghost us anyway.  

It happens more than I thought it would (typically 8 - 12 years after ones own estrangement from the same authoritarian relative that they have gone back to or gotten loved bombed by). 

In my own opinion, it's not worth finding out why they cut you off. It's not empathetic, and that's all I'd want to know. If I was to assume anything, it would be that they are not comfortable with the fact that you're still on the outside of the family dealing with the challenges of a totally independent life, while they are on the inside dealing with the challenges of co-dependency and trauma bonding with a volatile controlling narcissist and they figure you and they do not have much to say to each other any more ... or they are being pressured or manipulated by the narcissist not to have anything to do with you. One of those two things are taking place; I would bet money on it. 

Where once you looked like a hero to them to have spoken out about issues that you both experienced, now you just look pathetic to them for not having given into the narcissist(s).

In conclusion:

Assuming scapegoats are making mistakes about "the comparison mind-set" and indulging in "you shoulds", and "assuming abandonments when there aren't any", and "going back" to such an extent that they change their perspectives to the point of lecturing other scapegoats, and assuming they are not acting aggressively about these four things, that it's a true mistake, or unconscious on some level, they can clean up these past messes, these past legacies. A gentle reminder to a scapegoat that they are taking this legacy with them should horrify most of them enough to stop, or to want to stop. It did for me, and I thank my husband for that. 

To my mind, it is these four things which contribute to hurting other scapegoats.

For now I'll call them the "Four Horseman of the Scapegoat's Apocalypse" - the idea coming from John Gottman's "Four Horseman of the Apocalypse" . In the latter case, therapists and psychologists use Gottman's four horsemen to determine how destroyed a relationship is, and whether it has any chance of being repaired. The Four Horseman in that case are on-going criticisms, defensiveness, stonewalling and contempt. 

SOME STORIES ABOUT SCAPEGOATS WHO HAVE BEEN HURT
BY OTHER SCAPEGOATS

You can read Peeps autobiographical post through this link.
You can see for yourself what she lived through. 
Her story features all four of these Four Horseman of the Scapegoat's Apocalypse from her various family members.

I comment on some of her passages below.

She writes: 
     
My ole Army friend who had the multimillionaire parents, used to say something very strange to me. I worry about her and sometimes fear she probably ended up in bad circumstances from not detaching from her very wealthy and narcissistic parents. Sadly she inherited the "codes" of her family while I sought to reject what my family stood for. She often repeated to me that "humans were like chickens, and that the chickens always chose the weakest and most vulnerable to peck at and destroy". I used to reply, "That's messed up you know, that's not the way things are supposed to be." She accepted it as a fact of life.

Wow, I sure won't accept it. I know that it happens in narcissistic families, but I also know that there are many, many more parents who deal with situations like these (some of it from being a school teacher and being community oriented): rolling their permanently disabled child around in a wheel chair until the end of their days and do not regret a single minute of it. I know parents who spend night after night sleeping in the same hospital room with their child who is dying from cancer. I know parents who spend most of their time with their Downs Syndrome child and love doing it. I know parents who would do anything to bring back a child who has passed on, who don't go a day without missing them. I know parents who go to classes and therapy every week for years to learn how to deal with alcoholic children. I know parents who lovingly, and without hesitation, do everything they can do for adult children who have been to war and have significant trauma reactions from what they lived through and on-going feelings of hopelessness and depression. I know parents who have a daughter who was sexually abused as a young teenager who could barely function afterwards through her teens and into her twenties, and so the parents built her a small house on their property and financially decided to take care of her. I know a couple of parents whose children are amputees and help them night after night, and day after day going to physical therapy, buying limbs, helping them in and out of cars, chairs, the front door, etc, and provide either financial assistance (for one set of parents) a home for them (for another set of parents). I know parents who have children who are schizophrenics and who keep track of them and see them every week and are involved in their cases and care. 

I only know a handful of narcissistic parents, and yes, they pick on the weakest and most disabled every single time, and use them as an example for the remaining members to "put up" and be controlled. The message seems to be "If I can throw away a child who is disabled, and show that I don't care about them and their disability, I can throw you away too."

Emulating chickens is sad.

Peep writes about scapegoats who never leave their families and thinks they are in the majority. However, I see just the opposite. I know an awful lot of people who are estranged from a parent or their entire families, and some of them weren't scapegoated; it wasn't the reason for the estrangement. A lot of it is over lifestyle choices (who they love, or who they want to be in their adult years, and the parents do not approve), or they are estranged over politics (there are a lot of those types of familial estrangements). 

But getting back to estrangements with scapegoats, I tend to think and see the opposite of what she reports, that most of them go "no contact". It is heavily promoted by therapists in domestic abuse circles, for one. Most scapegoats end up in therapy because they don't know how to deal with the ways they are being treated, and family is the last place they can get help because of the cult-like atmosphere where the head narcissists decide, for everyone, how a member is to be treated. There are pressures, as well as threats, about how to treat others, "to follow suit". Therapists explain, and explain, and explain, to their clients how cult-like narcissistic families work, why they don't change, and how the abuse escalates against the scapegoat, with most of the more egregious abuse perpetrated by the enablers and co-bullies of the head narcissist. Some scapegoats die. It is not an issue to be taken lightly, in other words.

It is not something a scapegoat can change either ("Since when did they ever listen to what you had to say?" is the constant reminder you hear from therapists treating narcissistic abuse victims, that wiping out your voice is an ongoing agenda, that your words and feelings never meant anything compared to their own, and a few other family members they choose to be a mouthpiece).

The reason why therapists say you are a scapegoat is because narcissists need scapegoats. They are a "must", in narcissistic families. It's the only reason they exist at all. It has nothing to do with you (because you aren't listened to or known). If the narcissist is going to elevate themselves to the grandiose level of power, control and dominance over everyone and anyone, they need a scapegoat. And if you don't want that role any more they get extremely rageful, and abusive, and it drives them crazy, especially when you've got legal barriers against all of their attempts to re-scapegoat you - they believe that hurting you will both relieve them and get you back in the scapegoat role.  

When scapegoats are in therapy long enough, or they end up coming back over and over again because the domestic violence issues are actually getting much worse, it becomes clear that the therapists are right, that "no contact" is literally the only way to live.

For some of us it may take going back to realize it, but for many others all they have to do is to listen to the horrific survivor stories in the room to come to the realization, "I'm never going back."

Therapists who specialize in domestic violence treatment do try very hard to provide you with all kinds of services and groups to counteract the pressures to go back to the family (they let you know beforehand that "the terms" of going back will always mean you will be put in "the scapegoat role", always, always, always, that you won't be able to get out of the role by protesting, by explaining, by defending yourself, by telling the truth, by being a sycophant, by being saintly, that absolutely none of these things works when it comes to scapegoating). As long as these family members are not empathetic (it is very, very important to gauge the amount of empathy you receive), they won't see or care about how you are being effected by being their scapegoat. And it goes without saying that if they are sadistic, give you silence when you have something important to say, lecture you as though you are a seven year old, project their intentions and behaviors on to you, and spend lots of time blaming, shaming, gaslighting and indulging in perspecticide, they want you in the scapegoat role - no ifs, and, or buts: extremely important to know that. And therapists in this field do let you know it, over, and over, and over again. 

These sets of circumstances never make it appetizing to go back. And you can actually see the therapists are right via the other scapegoats around you sharing their scapegoating history.  

One way to tell if they don't want to scapegoat you are these signs:
* they respect you
* they listen to your side of the story
* they don't assume they know what you are doing, what you are feeling and what you are thinking; they ask you to go into detail
* they don't blow up at you if you say you are hurt by them
And some signs that they want, very badly, to keep you in the scapegoat role after you are estranged:
* every contact is rife with conflict
* they are trying to terrorize you for leaving
* they go silent on you when you ask them to respond to something important
* they don't care about your feelings
* they don't care about your side of the story
* they want no other communication with you except to lecture you or brow-beat you
* they continue their agenda of gaslighting, projecting, blame-shifting and lecturing
* someone else in the family will tell you to "get over it"

The signs of "wanting you back in your scapegoat role" are drilled into you over and over again. It's as though it is a mathematical equation that will always come out the same way every single time. 2 +2 = 4. Gaslighting, projecting, blame-shifting and lecturing = you are their beloved scapegoat.

Noooooooo!

Having scapegoats in ones family who are willingly living with abuse, and living with their abusers caretaking them, and never wanting to leave, as in Peep's family, are scapegoats I have never met. It may be the difference between the more conservative midwest, and the more liberal states in the northeast and the western coast. I'd also bet that in the liberal states, people are much more inclined to go to therapists for answers to interpersonal problems. Perhaps in the midwest, it's more about going to church and church leaders for answers, and yes, they are more inclined to say, "Stay with your family and turn the other cheek." 

Another story:

Toxic Positivity and an inability to be resilient between sisters:
I wrote this post which features two sisters who were "let go" by a father.
     They got along, lived together, helped each other for awhile.
     But one of the sisters was more resilient than the other sister. The resilient sister told the un-resilient sister to stop thinking about the parents, to get up and "do something!", to "stop moping around" and so on. 
     This is a perfect example of "you should", one of the four horseman of the scapegoat apocalypse. 
     It is also a perfect example of "comparing", one of the other four horseman of the scapegoat apocalypse. 
     And as I've said these two things do not work in relationships with other scapegoats. 
     One of the reasons why is that some people really do become disabled from narcissistic abuse. They become unable to cope mentally, emotionally, in keeping "going" and organized with their personal affairs, and their health even becomes trashed. Some of them start disassociating even. They aren't going to "snap out of it" no matter how much they are told to do so. They are going to act like any wounded animal. And guess what. When the wounding is that deep, it's normal, for God's sake!!
     Some people can snap out of it. They get wounded, feel healed, go out into the world, and never think about it. They want to bury it out of existence, as though it's a misfortunate nightmare that only took place in childhood and will never be experienced again. That's normal too. 
     Even though they seem juxtaposed, they are both normal reactions to narcissistic abuse.  
     One of them seems more like one of the Borderline reactions, but like all the Cluster B personality disorders, Borderlines usually grow up in environments of abuse and neglect too, or more importantly, abandoning environments which caused them pain and for their brain to develop a certain way (having predictable reactions to unstable environments depending on which of the four types of Borderline Personality Disorder that they have). 
     Judging someone else's level of trauma is really destructive to all relationships, not just between scapegoats. 
     The one sister who wasn't so resilient may have had more bullying, more scapegoating, more blaming and shaming than her sister, perhaps some bullying at school that her sister didn't have. Trauma takes on many forms, and it's not up to a sibling to tell us that our version of trauma needs to be fixed their way. 
     I don't know, but I would suspect that the abandonment of her sister was more traumatizing than the abandonment of her father. It probably added to it, and the brain considers the sister to be a threat and not someone she can trust either, so it is no wonder she fared worse. 
     There is no "putting your big girl pants on" and "facing the day" when trauma is involved. It has enough variations, and one of those variations is being disabled with overwhelming symptoms that a person cannot change on their own without professional help, and that a hostile sister definitely cannot change. 

ON THE WORLD-WIDE SCALE

We know that the groups who get scapegoated the most in a society tend to be minorities, and especially minorities who are financially challenged. 

In this country that was the Native Americans, Black former slave populations, people with Japanese ancestry who were full Americans, and women who were seen as second class citizens.

Intergenerational trauma still exists for these populations. 

briefly: 

So the antagonistic part, and even the hoovering, in terms of relating to Native Americans was done to get them to give up their land. White settlers made promises to the natives in the way of treaties, that white settlers would no longer be permitted to settle or invade their land ... until white settlers wanted more of their land, even the parcels that were officially signed over to them.
     In other words, broken promises became part of the legacy. 
     I do think broken promises can cause trauma.
     The history turned out to be a never ending series of many, many broken promises, broken treaties, destruction of their food supply, and a genocide whereby white settlers took land by force, and killed the natives if they were in the middle of these land grabs. They were relocated constantly and eventually put into concentration camps where soil was poor for growing food and grazing animals  (what we now refer to as reservations). 
     The natives lived in poverty, and they were even stripped of a food supply, making them totally dependent on the white man to supply them food. Many still live in poverty to this day.
     Politicians make promises and grand gestures to them now and then, but mostly it's a trauma-bonded kind of relationship that they have with the rest of the U.S.A., especially the government, something that never inspires them to have trust in people outside the reservations, the intentions towards them, and who can blame them - this seems like something that Russia seems to want to emulate in its war against Ukraine. 
     Most of "the help" in terms of money and tax breaks, is given to the top richest corporations and people of the USA, not to impoverished minorities like Native Americans, and not to recompensate them for the damage, genocide and land grabs that are still effecting those who are left.
     Do Native Americans sometimes target other Native Americans? Sometimes they do in this fashion:  Some tribes reprimand each other for their role as scouts in the 1800s, who lead white soldiers to other tribes knowing that the white soldiers would attack and kill the members of these tribes. Some of them are reprimanded for giving into the white man's practices, traditions, culture, viewpoints and alcohol. There is tension too when it comes to "giving in" to the fake promises, the unreliable incomes, and toxic practices, and general unempathetic viewpoints and actions in American culture. 

With black populations who were originally brought into the country to be bought and sold as slaves, and who were eventually freed after the Civil War, there has been a legacy of voter suppression, hiring suppression, Jim Crow laws, archaic "rules" like being required to ride in the back of a bus and not up front, not being admitted into stores, restaurants, restrooms, colleges, and other establishments; i.e. not being treated as "full human beings" with the same rights as the dominant white race in the country. 
     It is racism, and it is still going on today unfortunately.
     There is a legacy of poverty, lynching's, bombings of black churches, torching a city and black neighborhoods across the country, police brutality, corrupt and erroneous arrests and convictions, kangaroo courts, trauma and pain of populations because of what happened to relatives in the past, and the disenfranchisement that still goes on today, including continued acts of voter suppression and gerrymandering to keep black people from voting, and to make it harder for them to vote, and to keep them out of better paying jobs and careers. 
     Politicians make erroneous promises to these populations too, with changes that are baby steps at best, but do little to alleviate disenfranchisement and suffering in a major way. 
     Does this population sometimes pick on each other?
     Gang violence is one way this sometimes manifests.
     In my view, generational trauma bonding with white racists is one reason why a scapegoated, generationally traumatized group of people do not always coalesce to fight against disenfranchisement and prejudice, and why some of them are joining groups and political parties who have traditionally been racist and gerrymandering, some of them even extremely racist. 

     With Japanese Americans, 110,000 were scapegoated in World War Two and sent to concentration camps.
     Note that they were full American citizens, most of them born in America. Their ancestry went back to Japan, and for many of them, that was all; they no longer identified with Japanese culture. 
     You can read the story from Wikipedia. 
     I don't see any mention of in-fighting within the camps in the Wikipedia article, so perhaps in that case scapegoats did not hurt other scapegoats. 

     Women used to be considered the property of their husband's, and if they were spinsters, of their family of origin. They had no voting rights, and in England they were not allowed to own land or buildings. 
     Women were also groomed to be submissive. 
     If they weren't submissive enough, a husband or parent could have them committed to an institution for the mentally ill. During some period of time, these institutions practiced lobotomies on their patients, rendering them so submissive and brain damaged that they were incarcerated for life in them. 
     Even if you were submissive, you could still be committed to an institution for the mentally ill because you were no longer wanted. 
     As we know, the problem with being submissive in all situations is that you can be abused (it renders you powerless, without feelings or a voice in terms of how people treat you and "what is expected of you" and "what is done to you.")
     The message is that you don't have a choice as far as your fate. 
     In all forms of scapegoating, being submissive, subjugated, pleasing, and a sycophant is a requirement in terms of acceptance. And yes, this still happens today, even in the country I live in, even with more women in the workforce than not. 
     Do women who have endured expectations of being submissive at all times from a family of origin or from a husband scapegoat other women?
     Yes they do, and from being in the workforce, and still in the workforce to a large degree, I would say that it is pervasive, disturbing and even disgusting if they are touting themselves as women's libbers, or for women's rights.
     However, workplaces have been getting so much better in my own experience from an older generation of women who never practiced what they preached finally, finally retiring. The rancor, the nasty gossip, lording themselves over a younger generation of women when they were equals in pay and positions - "don't kick yourself in the bottom as you go out the door to your retirement!" It was torturous in many ways. 
     Again, from my own experience, my own generation of women learned a lot from that, and we don't do this to each other or to younger women. The workplace is quite peaceful, a drastic turn-around from what it was before, thank God.  

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a quote from Dr. Gordon Neufeld: