The scapegoat has to be found as the ‘worthless’ one by the narc parent and the rest of the family. And if that child wants to share a reality with the family – an absolute necessity – then s/he better start finding themselves to be worthless in kind. Today I want to talk about some possible configurations of the Self the child must make to endure this form of abuse and how this configuration can be addressed and healed once someone is in a position to recover from it.
The scapegoated child is faced with hostility, cruelty and contempt where they are programmed to expect love, support, and kindness. In order to maintain the child’s attachment to the only family they have it’s necessary not to lose hope that they may still find what they are looking for in that family. That hope lets the child survive what they have to survive and avoid the abandonment implosion that could happen without it. It also requires the child configure himself to expect and go along with mistreatment in a specific way.
The objective is to find a way to suffer the pain of felt rejection and discarding from the narcissistic parent and family while remaining oblivious that this how one is being treated and therefore able to remain willing to keep seeking those same parents’ company & acceptance. In order for this to be a compartment of the self – the wounded self - has to receive the feelings of humiliation, inferiority, and shame that are felt. And a different separate part of the self has to retain and nurse the hope that he will find his parents to be who he needs them to be next time rather than who they actually are – the hopeful self.
David Celani discusses this in his book 'Leaving Home': https://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Home-Separating-Difficult-Family/dp/0231134770
Often children in the scapegoat maintain their ability to keep going by maintaining the split within themselves: between the part that suffers the rejection, contempt, and cruelty and pushes this unconscious and the part that retains hope that he will be received how he wants his parents to receive him.
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