The Hidden Discomfort of Outgrowing Your Old Life
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Family scapegoat abuse affects a person’s identity to the core. The challenges don’t end just because you’ve extracted yourself from the source of abuse.
When you’re in contact or low contact with the dysfunctional family of origin, you’re exposed to cognitive dissonance.
They’re imposing a fabricated identity on you i.e ‘You are bad and wrong’ and then there’s the part of you who knows that what they’re doing is abusive and how they interact with you is causing you harm.
Because they only view you through the lens of ‘bad and wrong’ you must adjust your identity in order to be accepted into the (myth of) belonging.
This involves some part of you carrying the belief ‘There’s something wrong with me’ and ‘I’m inferior’.
When you’re No Contact you no longer have to live with these two conflicting identities. Without the external noise you’re afforded the space to excavate your true identity.
It’s normal to have parts of you who were influenced by the gaslighting and question - ‘Am I the narcissist?’, parts of you (like an angry inner teen) who says ‘F you’ to the lot of them and inner child parts who are devastated at the loss of belonging even though that belonging wasn’t safe or authentic.
You may bump up against a type of shock when all parts of you realise; “I’m not who they said I was”.
This puts you face to face with the betrayal.
You’re no longer subjected to the burden of gang bullying but you do have to come to terms with the damage this caused.
You’ll need to reckon with the decades of suffering and cruelty and the ‘how could they have done that?’
The full weight of that can take time to process.
When you’re in it, you don’t get this luxury (because the abuse is still ongoing).
Usually the only regret people have of going No Contact is that they didn’t have the means to do it sooner. Being free from the abuse is a privilege and it also reveals further layers of healing you didn’t have access to before.
As you move through those layers you may realise the more you heal the greater the distance between you and your origin family. Every step forward you take, every healing milestone, makes it more impossible to return. You’re worlds apart.
It’s like being on a ship as it sets sail watching the land disappear from view.
You’ve left the old world behind but haven’t yet docked in your new home.
This phase of healing will expose you to any younger parts of your psyche who still hold out hope for a miracle of acceptance from them.
It can take years to fully let go of that hope because doing so means rewiring your original attachment. The inner child may still be pining for the parents they needed.
It takes patience and consistency to develop the inner trust that you now are your own safe attachment figure.
It requires grieving what never happened that was supposed to happen, grieving what happened that wasn’t supposed to happen and the irreversibility of the passing of time. That can be a lot to sit with.
And it needs to be faced. If it’s not, life will loop in the same unhelpful patterns that cause pain. There are real life consequences to not reconciling with the trauma.
‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where do I belong?’ are the questions the psyche needs to reconcile with in the aftermath of No Contact.
These are no small questions - they’re existential. This is the discomfort of outgrowing your old life.
If you’ve been trying to heal this for years and it still hasn’t fully resolved, it’s because the level of work required at this stage is different.
I work one-to-one with people in this exact position, those who are ready to move beyond insight and finally resolve the deeper identity and attachment patterns left by scapegoat abuse.
If you’re ready for that level of work, you can apply here.
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About the Author
Mary Toolan is the founder of Scapegoat Child Recovery Ltd.
She works with high-functioning adults who were cast as the family scapegoat and are now navigating life after No Contact, or actively working towards it.
Her work helps people untangle the attachment trauma and identity conditioning shaped by family scapegoating, so they can build a calmer, more self-directed life.
