The Family Scapegoat Who Was Never Allowed to Grow Up
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subconscious patterns that keep capable people stuck
For survivors of family scapegoating trauma there’s a risk that you never psychologically enter adulthood. You might not even realise this because it’s all you’ve ever known - a part of your psyche is permanently located in childhood.
It may explain why life feels hard.
Most dysfunctional families are enmeshed - the adults are unable to distinguish where they end and their child begins. They use their child as a utility to get their own needs met.
In dysfunctional families the adults are emotionally immature. A common experience for the family scapegoat is being prohibited from individuating and separating from the parent.
The parent, due to their own lack of development is only able to focus on themselves. They’re not equipped to parent a child.
There comes a time when the child has a healthy impulse to step away from the parent as the centre of their world. They have a healthy desire to branch out, explore their values, deepen their personal relationships outside the family unit, and experience the freedom to grow into their own identity.
In dysfunctional families this essential development doesn’t get a chance to take place and that can haunt the individual for decades to come.
The parent cannot handle their child’s psychological separation. It triggers their own attachment trauma. They may register their child’s growth as a personal attack. It might feel like they're losing a best friend…. or therapist, someone they heavily leaned on for their needs.
Here’s a snapshot what happens:
Parent has child
Child worships parent (age 0-12)
Parent is happy
Child leaves primary/ elementary school and becomes a teen
Child no longer worships the parent
Parent senses child attempting to individuate
Parent experiences loss of control and panics
Parent locks this down with consequences and punishment
Child experiences fear and abandonment
Child must organise a survival strategy
Child squashes their natural desire to separate psychologically from the parent - it doesn’t feel safe and there is no permission
Child now prioritises the parent
Parent is placated - they have successfully used their child to self soothe
Child is now trauma bonded with the parent.
To understand the emotional reality of this dynamic, imagine the following scene.
The parent is in a lake, flailing about, eyes fixed on their child who is standing on the shoreline. The parent is panicked and calls out to their child ‘Please help me, please save me’. The child is terrified and feels 100% responsible for the parents' life.
In the child’s mind, if the parent perishes, it will be their fault. They must do everything in their power to save the parent from the parent’s helplessness.
For the child, this parent is their lifeline, if the parent dies, the child feels they will not survive. This is obviously an appropriate fear for a child.
But if we peel back the curtain on the scene - something that the child does not yet have the maturity to understand - is that the parent is actually standing on a plastic crate. They are in no danger of drowning.
Further to that, there’s a lifeboat nearby ready to pull them to safety but the parent refuses to ask for help.
This is what the child experiences - a life-and-death responsibility for the parent that becomes imprinted in the psyche as a survival response.
Part of the child’s psyche then gets ‘frozen in time’.
Human attachment principles make it impossible for the child at that time, to override the parents authority.
As Gabor Maté famously says, “attachment trumps authenticity.”
The child internalises that it does not have permission to individuate from the parent.
They’re now set up to prioritise the parents' mental health over the direction of their own life.
The inner dialogue sounds like:
I must never surpass my parent
Any time the child attempts to become their own independent person they’ll be met with some form of backlash from the parent such as withdrawal, dismissal, coldness or jealousy. This creates survival level terror for the child.
The parent is unable to provide the encouragement and validation they deserve.
The subtext from the parent is ‘the world out there is scary, do NOT go forth and prosper, stay here and be small with me’.
And the guilt tripping parentification trauma bond imprint of ‘please don’t leave me behind’.
If the parent has an emotional age of 12, when their child surpasses the age of 12, the parent’s psyche starts viewing their child as their carer, minder and helper.
It’s always about them - their needs, their feelings, their sense of safety in the world.
Yet at the flick of a switch, they can also become the intimidating authority who tightly controls and misuses their power.
This is the psychological contract the child carries into adulthood.
How this shows up in adult life
It’s normal to want to forget about these complex parental relationships and just live your life. To a certain degree we can shove this trauma to the furthest recesses of our mind.
However, in practice it’s not possible to live a liberated life if that original trauma bond is still in place.
The inner child remains tethered to the parent and believes they are protecting the parent from their unprocessed pain. Just like the parent was once carrying the unprocessed pain of the generation before them.
This trauma is invisible. You can’t tell by looking at someone that their subconscious is locked into a trauma bond with their lineage.
But it will show up in how far they allow themselves to move beyond what was possible for their elders.
Here’s one way it tends to play out:
You build your career or business to a place you’re really proud of. This takes years of consistency and hard work. You gain traction. Visibility increases. Income and sales start flourishing.
Then something strange starts to happen. You gradually stop doing the things you did to grow your career and business. You take your foot off the gas. You might pivot to new projects. Months pass. Before you know it things have slowed or stalled and you never saw it coming.
On the surface it might look like procrastination or poor business strategy.
But underneath is evidence of a contract you never consented to - one you were locked into decades earlier through the dysfunction that played out in your lineage.
The loyalty your inner child holds toward the parent is maintained with an iron grip because, as we explored earlier, it was forged in what the child experienced as a life-and-death situation.
Your psyche did not get an opportunity to update the record.
You don’t feel safe experiencing any more success.
Your subconscious turns its attention back toward the parent with toxic compassion.
Your parent never got the opportunities you did, they could never do what you do, they may never experience what you now have and your inner child says ‘I don’t want to hurt them’.
What is the inner child afraid will happen if the parent feels hurt?
The inner child is afraid they’ll be abandoned and suffer.
Their thinking is still ‘frozen in time’, locked in the logic of childhood.
Until this attachment trauma and loyalty bind is addressed, some part of you will keep applying the brakes, afraid to fully live your adult life.
Why doesn’t this wound just fall away over time? Doesn’t time ‘heal all wounds’?
Attachment is oxygen to a child. The child is oriented to the original guardian and still seeking something from them. Unless there is a solid trusted replacement, the child will never abandon their post.
They will continue to search, seek, hope and pine for the parent and everything they needed to receive - love, safety, nurture, witnessing, acknowledgement, a sense of belonging, being seen and heard, validation, acceptance and praise. All things children receive in a healthy parent-child relationship where the parent possesses a solid sense of self.
There is another psychological element at play. Because the parental rejection and lack of acceptance is such a profound injury to a young child who relies on that parent for survival, the mind must perform something extraordinarily unnatural: it sacrifices the child’s own life direction in order to protect the parent.
To make sense of the terror they feel in their body, the child’s mind often creates powerful beliefs. These beliefs can take mythic forms:
‘If I let go of my mother’s hand, God will punish me’.
‘If I surpass my parent, something terrible will happen’.
It makes sense in parentification because if an infant is in your care and you are not bonded with them and attending to their every need, they will perish. For the family scapegoat, they have internalised this traumatic role reversal due to the parents actions.
Every adult knows that becoming a healthy autonomous adult does not bring retribution from the gods nor does it cause another person’s death, but for a traumatised child without sane adult help, this meaning-making makes sense.
It serves to keep the attachment intact. Without this attachment and without some ‘story’ to make sense of the unbearable truth that the parent is incapable of providing love and good enough parenting to the child, the child may not survive the weight of the trauma.
Family scapegoat survivors are highly capable and possess intelligence, discipline and talent.
Yet, they are potentially unknowingly carrying a psychological contract formed in childhood that says:
Do not outgrow the parent.
Until that invisible contract is brought to light and healed, life can feel like pushing a boulder up a hill.
When a child is never allowed to individuate, part of their psyche stays behind in childhood, organising their adult life around protecting the parent.
Their adult life never truly sets sail. Some part of them is still stuck on that shoreline watching their parent in the water.
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About the Author
Mary Toolan is the founder of Scapegoat Child Recovery Ltd.
She works with self-aware adults who were cast as the family scapegoat and are now navigating life after No Contact.
Her work helps people untangle the attachment trauma and identity conditioning left behind by family scapegoating so they can build a calmer, more self-directed life.
Learn more about her 1:1 work.
