The Real Reason Scapegoats Can't Root for Themselves

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]The real reason scapegoats can't root for themselves.

[00:00:04]Does the world feel like a critical and punitive place? Does your mind and body assume that if others show any form of displeasure with you, that they're right to feel that way, and that you're going to be exposed and completely at fault?

[00:00:18]And when others are talking, do you police yourself to make sure that you're listening intently, never interrupting with your own thoughts because it feels like you'd be way out of line?

[00:00:28]For scapegoat survivors, hostility from others can feel like the price of just being alive. It feels like it's everywhere and that it doesn't need a specific reason to be there.

[00:00:39]A scapegoat survivor can be sitting quietly on a train, walking down a sidewalk, or sending an email, and their nervous system may already feel like they're on probation with the world.

[00:00:50]Their mind usually scrambles to create explanations to make that hostility make sense. Maybe there's thoughts like, "I'm fat. I'm ugly. I'm too much. Oh, I shouldn't have said that."

[00:01:03]The sense of being inherently offensive or objectionable to others has to come first. Then the reasons for that get kind of retrofitted afterwards.

[00:01:14]So, the scapegoat survivor's conscious and unconscious mind starts from the "I'm the problem" and then goes to work filling in the why. Maybe they walk into a work meeting or they're standing in line at a coffee shop when the same core feeling hits. Something like, "Everyone here is basically right and good, and I'm in the wrong."

[00:01:35]Well, today's video is my attempt to spell out why this happens for the scapegoat child, how it sticks around after childhood, and what eventually can help it improve. My name is Jay Reid, and I'm a licensed psychotherapist in California, and I specialize in helping scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents recover the quality of life that I think they deserve. To understand why escape goat survivors world can feel this way, we have to go back to something very basic that I think every child needs. So, every child has to find a balance between good and bad in themselves and in the parent that they depend on. From very early on, a child feels love, gratitude, and appreciation for their parent, typically in, you know, good enough families.

[00:02:22]This is the going to be the person who feeds them, picks them up, looks into their eyes, and smiles at them. There's warmth there.

[00:02:30]At the same time, the child may also feel frustration and anger when that parent isn't available. Maybe they're distracted or unable to connect with the child in that moment. Like perhaps the bottle is late so the baby can be fed or the parent has to turn away to answer the phone or the baby's diaper is wet and no one's coming to change them yet.

[00:02:49]Both sets, this warmth and this frustration, are real.

[00:02:54]The child's developmental task is to sort these out and that can only happen when the predominant experience with this parent is good.

[00:03:03]In these cases, the parent is mostly responsive. They care about the baby's happiness. They work to make the baby comfortable, fed, and clean. They play with the baby, but because they're human, these parents also have occasional lapses where they may frustrate or leave the baby wanting.

[00:03:22]If the baby's allowed to get upset and then be comforted by that same parent, they learn most of the time mom or dad is good. Sometimes they're bad, but not so bad that they can't become good again.

[00:03:36]And when they're bad, they care that the child sees them as bad, which confirms that they're still mostly good. And as the child learns this about their parent, they can extend the same rule to themselves. Something like, I'm mostly good. Sometimes I act or feel in ways that are bad, but I can make amends and that keeps me mostly good. For this to happen, the parent has to be the more psychologically resourced person in the relationship. The parent needs to have a more developed mind, more capacity, and more emotional stability. Because they need to tolerate the child's full range of reactions. The The child's love and delight and also the frustration, the anger, and even the I hate you moments from the baby.

[00:04:21]Baby child kind of as a placeholder.

[00:04:24]When the parent can offer the child this, that child is then free to have their honest reaction to the parent's predominant goodness, but also the occasional badness without feeling like they're going to break or lose the parent if they feel what they truly feel. Out of that, a few really important things develop. First, the child's frustration and anger have a place to land on the parent without destroying the relationship. The child can feel, "I'm mad at you." while still knowing, "You're my parent and you're basically good."

[00:04:55]Second, the child learns, "I can be frustrated with someone I love and neither of us is destroyed by it."

[00:05:02]Third, the child starts to develop the capacity to hold good and bad together in themselves and in others. Something like, "I can be a good kid who sometimes has angry thoughts. My parent can be a good parent who sometimes gets it wrong." Well, what the narcissistic parent does instead For the scapegoat child of a narcissistic parent, that whole sorting out the good versus bad feelings process gets hijacked. The narcissistic parent doesn't make themselves available to the child in their greater psychological resourcefulness. They don't stand there as the stable container that the child gets to bounce their feelings off of.

[00:05:41]Instead, the narcissistic parent uses their scapegoat child as the repository for the badness that the parent feels in themselves yet can't tolerate.

[00:05:52]So, instead of thinking, "Sometimes I'm irritable." or "Sometimes I'm unfair." a narcissistic parent pushes those qualities out of their own awareness and locates them in their scapegoat child.

[00:06:04]With saying things and and and conveying attitudes to the child like, "You're so selfish. You're always starting trouble.

[00:06:11]You're ungrateful." or "You're the problem in this family."

[00:06:15]So, the scapegoat child gets treated and seen as the bad one by their narcissistic parent. The parent devalues, deprives, and domineers the child into agreement with the parent.

[00:06:27]So, the parent can be harsh, rejecting, contemptuous, or icy. And the scapegoat child then experiences the parent's actual lack of availability and hostility.

[00:06:38]And at first, the child may honestly see the parent as bad. Like, "You're hurting me." or "You're not here for me."

[00:06:44]That may be a normal, honest reaction to what is actually happening between the parent and child. The problem is that this honest perception collides directly with what the narcissistic parent needs to believe about themselves.

[00:06:58]The parent can't tolerate being seen as bad by others or themselves. That's intolerable to their own very fragile yet exaggerated sense of self-worth. So, the scapegoat child's accurate perception of the parent has no place to go. There's no reality with this parent where the child gets to be upset with them for how they're being mistreated and where the parent works to repair the relationship.

[00:07:23]So, therefore, there's no room in this relationship for the child to honestly work out feelings and and and thoughts like, "Hey, you're doing something harmful to me and I'm angry about it."

[00:07:34]The only reality that is allowed is the parent's reality. Where the parent is good, supposedly, and the child is supposedly bad.

[00:07:43]So now we come to the core adaptation that the child has to make in order to exist in this world. Relocating goodness into the bad parent. This is the part that explains why later in life the scapegoat survivor can walk through the world feeling like the offender among righteous judges. What the narcissistic parent is doing would make them too bad to be a viable parent in the scapegoat child's mind. So if that child let themselves fully see the parent as someone who is chronically devaluing, depriving, and domineering them, then the parent becomes unusable as a parent.

[00:08:21]They would stop being someone that the child can safely depend on even in their imagination.

[00:08:27]Psychologically, no viable parent means no shared world to inhabit with someone else, leaving the child feeling like nobody to no one. And that's a psychologically unsurvivable place to be.

[00:08:40]So the child stands at the edge of kind of an inner cliff. On one side is reality where they're saying their parent, "You're treating me horribly."

[00:08:49]On the other side though is annihilation. Like, "If I accept that you're this bad, I don't have a parent and therefore I don't exist."

[00:08:57]To pull themselves back from this brink, the scapegoat child's mind does something very necessary yet very costly.

[00:09:04]Without any conscious choice, this child takes what's good in themselves and relocates that goodness into the badly acting parent.

[00:09:14]"I'll take everything that's good about me and load that into you, mom or dad.

[00:09:18]You'll be the good one."

[00:09:20]At the same time, the child takes all of the badness onto themselves. Like, "I'm the selfish one. I'm the troublemaker and the one who ruins everything. So I deserve the harsh tone, the withdrawal, and the punishment that I get from mom and dad."

[00:09:36]Now in the child's world, the parent has enough borrowed goodness to be a viable parent. The parent is good enough now to hang on to.

[00:09:46]Which means there's a parent, a child, and a world that they can both inhabit.

[00:09:51]Again, it's not a conscious decision.

[00:09:53]The scapegoat child doesn't sit there and and reason through it, but the child's unconscious mind does it for them. Because the alternative is just too grave to bear. And here's the fundamental point to all of this. Even though the child has now located their own goodness in the parent and sees that narcissistic parent as good, that doesn't stop this parent from being bad towards the child. The parent still humiliates, ignores, and controls the child, but now in that scapegoat child's psychological reality, it is a good person who's doing these things to them.

[00:10:31]So, the scapegoat child's mind gets scrambled in a very specific way. They can no longer distinguish who's actually being bad and who's actually being good.

[00:10:42]Because in their internal world, the good parent is treating the bad child badly. This gives that that narcissistic parent complete authority in the child's mind, even though that parent is acting abusively. If the scapegoat child didn't need to keep the narcissistic parent good in in the child's mind, they could recognize this as an encounter with someone who's being cruel or unfair and write it off like, "Oh, you're being terrible to me." That could land on the parent and stay there. But the scapegoat child can't afford to do that. They need the parent to be good in order to have any world to share with them at all.

[00:11:21]So, the parent's abusive treatment lands as authoritative, deserved, and correct.

[00:11:27]The child may reason, "I'm being screamed at, so I must have done something awful." Or I'm being ignored, so I must be inherently unlovable.

[00:11:36]Or I'm being micromanaged, so I must be fundamentally incapable. And when I say reason, I mean in an unconscious way.

[00:11:44]The child's system is now organized around one core arrangement. The other is good and right to treat me like I'm defective and wrong. That's again the only way the child could keep existing.

[00:11:57]Internalization, how this becomes the child's self.

[00:12:00]Well, so far we've been talking about what's happening between the child and the parent, but now I'd like to talk about what happens inside the child.

[00:12:09]So, the child has to internalize these self-to-other and other-to-self patterns. That means when the child later thinks of themselves, they do so through the lens of how the other related to them.

[00:12:21]In this case, the other is someone who calls out the child's flaws, punishes them brutally for being fallible, and ignores the child's needs. And that other is now coded as a good person in the child's mind. That's what locks it in. The badness that the child has to swallow is enormous. It comes from three sources at once. First, the child has nowhere to put their honest frustrations and anger at the parent who's actually treating them badly.

[00:12:52]Those feelings don't get to land where they belong, so they get turned inward.

[00:12:57]Like if I'm this angry, the child might say to themselves, again unconsciously, "If I'm this angry, then I must be the problem." Second, the child's being forced to be the bad one that the parent insists they are in order to share reality with their parent. So, they have to kind of adopt something like to their parent, "If you say I'm selfish and ungrateful, and the only way I get to belong at all is to agree with you, then I agree. I am selfish and ungrateful."

[00:13:25]And then third, all of this combines into a pretty horrible alloy of badness that becomes the child's complete sense of who they are.

[00:13:35]And this is why the scapegoat survivor adult scapegoat survivor's feeling of being bad and finding hostility all around them is so persistent. They're dealing with the basic way their mind got wired to keep them psychologically alive. How this feels as an adult, the world as hostile.

[00:13:54]Well, let's connect all this back to those everyday experiences that we started with. The operating rule is something like only others can be good, even when they treat me badly. My right to exist depends on keeping them good and keeping myself bad or wrong.

[00:14:11]In a very real way, the scapegoat survivor can fear not existing if this isn't the case. If others aren't the good authoritative ones, then there's no one to share reality with, or so it can feel. The scapegoat survivor is now back at that early cliff edge. If I see you as bad, I lose my world. So, daily life becomes a process of dodging punishment that feels deserved. The adult scapegoat survivor is crossing the street and maybe a car has to wait 3 seconds longer than the driver may want. The driver's face might seem neutral, but the scapegoat survivor's system can fill in the rest with they're so mad at me right now and they're clearly in the right.

[00:14:54]I'm holding them up and just awful for doing so. These thoughts feel so convincing because those characteristics match the narcissistic parents. If the driver in this example were in fact this way, they'd be entitled, self-important, and have a low tolerance for frustration.

[00:15:12]And those ways of being got deeply encoded as what good other people act like. Or maybe the adult scapegoat survivor goes to lunch at work and as they approach their desk again after getting back, they strongly expect their boss to be standing there looking at their watch asking why they were off slacking off. And even if their boss has never done that, the survivor's nervous system may insist that that's the only reasonable thing that's about to happen.

[00:15:40]So, within this system, there's no way for the scapegoat survivor to assert their rights because they're not allowed to have any. The other person has to have all all the rights. That's the deal that the scapegoat survivor's nervous system and unconscious had to make in order to exist earlier in life. Any complaint or boundary from them is an outrageous violation, or so it can feel.

[00:16:05]It's as if any ordinary human mistake on their part has to be a punishable offense. And all of this reflects how the scapegoat survivor's psychological world got organized in childhood to keep a parent viable at the cost of the scapegoat child's own sense of goodness and their sense of entitlement to exist as a good person. Well, what's needed for this to change today? Well, I I want to talk about this in a way that's both hopeful and honest about the depth of what we're talking about.

[00:16:35]I think what's needed is in one sense very simple.

[00:16:38]This a scapegoat survivor needs new relational experience. They need an ongoing important relationship where the other person is there and treats them consistently well even when that scapegoat survivor has reactions of frustration or anger towards them.

[00:16:55]Where the scapegoat survivor can say, "I'm upset with you." or show that they feel hurt or disappointed and the other person doesn't retaliate, collapse, or make the survivor into the enemy.

[00:17:07]Instead, this other person stays and tries to help the survivor sort out their experience.

[00:17:13]That kind of relationship starts to teach the scapegoat survivors unconscious that something radically different is true now. Something like now there's another person here who can help me make sense of what I'm feeling.

[00:17:27]Rather than just using me to get rid of their own badness. Over time this begins to undo that mind scrambling I was talking about earlier.

[00:17:36]The scapegoat survivor starts to be able to distinguish their own goodness from the goodness they had to project into others. And they begin to sense that maybe they do have some inherent decency, a sense of fairness and worth.

[00:17:49]And that it doesn't depend on keeping everyone else perfect and themselves as defective or wrong. Well, an important question is where can scapegoat survivors get this kind of new relational experience? Well, one place I want to talk about that I think is designed specifically specifically for this is what's called psychoanalysis.

[00:18:09]And this is a long-term therapy usually two to four times a week where the entire structure is set up to give scapegoat survivor exactly what we've been talking about. A new relationship that can withstand the scapegoat survivor's entire range of feelings.

[00:18:25]Meeting more often like this allows a real relationship to develop where the old lessons from growing up with a narcissistic parent get to come to the surface and be tested in this relationship. The scapegoat survivor will likely find that the same expectations they have of the world will show up in the treatment. And they'll anticipate the analyst's hostility, judgment, and rejection. And they may also feel like any anger towards the analyst will destroy the relationship.

[00:18:54]The work then is to notice those expectations, talk about them, and see what actually happens again and again.

[00:19:03]Excavating this kind of early adaptation, one that created a world where the scapegoat child had to be defective and undeserving in order to have any world at all is a long, but I think extremely worthwhile undertaking.

[00:19:18]I think it asks for a lot of courage and patience from those who work to change it. But again, it's worth it because what's at stake is the scapegoat survivor's right to live as a person among other people, rather than as a permanent offender moving amongst different judges. Well, one of the obvious barriers is who has the time and money to devote to this kind of, you know, treatment. And that's so legitimate. Um I what may be good news is that there are what's called psychoanalytic training institutes throughout the US and in many other countries where um scapegoat survivors can work with psychoanalysts who are in training at lower fees.

[00:20:00]I've actually created a list of these programs in the United States and um put that in the description box below. So, if you live also outside the US, this could be a good question for your favorite AI chatbot, like um show me or tell me where uh the closest uh psychoanalytic institutes are. Well, if what I've described today resonates, then I want you to know this isn't because you're too dramatic or weak or too sensitive. It's it may likely be because as a child, you had to do something incredibly complex and sacrificial with your own sense of goodness in order to survive.

[00:20:38]The work now is to slowly take that goodness back while learning in relationship that doing so no longer threatens ties to the people you need.

[00:20:47]So much of what we just talked about is how this scapegoat spell gets installed and maintained. How life gets morphed into something that the scapegoat survivor has to get through instead of being allowed to enjoy. And by scapegoat spell, I I just mean um the sense that you have to live your life according to the fundamental beliefs that you're defective, there's something wrong with you, and that your needs are less important than others, or that you're undeserving. And if you'd like to go deeper into this, then I'd encourage you to check out my scapegoat spell recovery system. It's a complete guide to understanding how the spell gets cast in the first place, how it can still run in the scapegoat survivor's unconscious and nervous system, and direct you towards experiences that help you begin to break it.

[00:21:36]The system includes the book called The Scapegoat Spell, How Narcissistic Parents Cast It and How You Break It, which lays out the whole mechanism we've been talking about today. This lets you see the full picture of what happened and why you may still feel these ways.

[00:21:52]It also comes with a companion workbook that takes everything in the book and allows you to apply those concepts into your life today. You get to track where and when the scapegoat spell shows up in your life today, and practice tactics to operate differently. On top of that, the survivor gets a guided meditation designed specifically for scapegoat survivors.

[00:22:14]Understanding the spell is one thing, but getting your body to register safety is another, and this meditation is designed to bridge that gap.

[00:22:23]Finally, there's a full webinar on how scapegoat survivors overcome imposter syndrome. Which, you know, if you've been following what I've described today about relocating goodness into others, you may probably see why imposter syndrome can be such a natural consequence of the whole scapegoating process. Well, if you feel like walking around in life means kind of having a target on your back where everyone's going to find you to be objectionable or wrong, then I hope today's video helped you make some sense of that. And with that, I'd like to thank you for your continued support of this channel and the resources around it. And again, you know, the comments that are posted each week and the support uh shown one another and the bravery and sharing your own story is just it's just you know, awesome to to see.

[00:23:12]So with that I look forward to posting again next week. Take care.