A Letter to the Family Scapegoat
If you were the one in your family who was always too much, too sensitive, too difficult — this is for you. You were not the problem. You were the truth-teller.
Tasha Darwent
Integrative Health Coach
I want to say something to you that no one in your family of origin was likely able to say.
You were not the problem.
The role you were assigned — the difficult one, the dramatic one, the one who could not just get over it — was not a description of your character. It was a function. Every family system needs somewhere to put the parts of itself that it cannot bear to look at. You were the place those parts got put.
The cost
The cost of being the family's mirror is that you grow up suspecting that whatever is wrong is your fault. You grow up over-functioning, or under-functioning, or both in alternating cycles. You grow up exquisitely tuned to other people's moods and dangerously dull to your own. You grow up believing the story the family told about you because, when everyone you love agrees on something, the strain of disagreeing is unbearable.
The scapegoat is not the family's weakest member. The scapegoat is most often the one whose system could not stop telling the truth.
The way forward
The work, slowly, is to disentangle who you are from the role you were handed. To grieve the family you needed and did not get. To find the people who can see you as you actually are, not as the family's mirror needed you to be. And then to live, on purpose, in the shape that fits you — not the shape that fit them.
It is the long way home. There is no other way.
