The ‘invisible ceiling’ high functioning No Contact scapegoat survivors encounter - that’s hurting their career
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Survivors of family scapegoating abuse are highly competent, capable and resilient.
A lot of them become entrepreneurs and build their own businesses.
This gives them a place to pour their energy, creativity and passion, now that they’re no longer consumed by the painful antics and drama of the origin family.
They begin to thrive.
However, what can happen after this is something that’s rarely if ever spoken about.
They may reach a level of success beyond which feels impossible to stabilise. They may encounter a block or resistance or what feels like ‘self sabotage’.
This is the scapegoat survivor ‘invisible ceiling’.
There’s success on the outside but discombobulation on the inside.
The nervous system hasn’t caught up with the external evidence.
The new success doesn’t track with the original nervous system blueprint.
Everything was fine when the business was in build phase. It was hard work and effort to get everything off the ground. As soon as momentum kicks in, this is where the wheels can start to loosen.
For the family scapegoat there’s a unique intersection between entrepreneurship and identity.
A business gains success due to more exposure and visibility.
For a person whose nervous system was wired to equate exposure and visibility with danger, this can be problematic.
The exposure reveals unhealed layers of trauma.
The scapegoat survivor doesn't have a solid internal map for an existence where high visibility is safe. The nervous system doesn’t care about revenue, it only cares about what feels safe and perhaps more importantly what feels familiar.
The nervous system isn’t interested in novelty.
The family scapegoat has an internal thermometer for the level of success and visibility they can handle without it setting off alarm bells and the nervous system saying ‘we remember this level of exposure and last time it meant annihilation’.
As a child, when you were your unselfconscious self you were attacked. Your intelligence incited jealousy, rage and abandonment. This happened repeatedly - by the people who were responsible for your survival.
So you learnt to be another version of you - more palatable, less controversial, quieter and softer.
Now, in your professional life the very strategy that kept you alive as a child is hurting your business.
You’ve activated your ‘invisible ceiling’. Paradoxically, you’d never have encountered this if it wasn’t for your impulse to learn, grow and expand.
The ‘invisible ceiling’ doesn’t activate if you stay within the ‘safe zone’ of who your primary caregivers authorised you to be. But you’re not doing that.
Brushing up against your ‘invisible ceiling’ can cause you to experience internal states that contradict your adult competence such as collapse, avoidance, self-abandonment, compulsions, or freeze.
Practically this may look like:
- the website guy you hired 12 months ago and has gone over budget 3 times and still hasn’t delivered
- you keep procrastinating and postponing the planning meeting and slidedeck for the conference you were asked to headline
- your business goes through cycles of abundance and success followed by lack and urgency [feast/famine]
This means the business is built upon a highly adrenalised nervous system making it difficult to scale and risking burnout.
Your subconscious is screaming - ‘growth is not safe’.
Without understanding the ‘invisible ceiling’ people try to solve these problems by hiring a speaking coach, visibility coach, strategist, OBM or expanding the sales team, rebranding or any other external way. They’re surprised when it doesn’t positively impact the long term. It was never rooted in an external fault.
No external change can remedy what is an internal CEO-level ‘invisible ceiling’.
When family scapegoat survivors understand this, it can make their life so much easier.
Post No Contact recovery needs to focus on who you are at the level of identity.
The ‘invisible ceiling’ exists when the scapegoat survivor is still subconsciously coupling high visibility, success and exposure to control and annihilation.
It was true in childhood but childhood is over.
Until this invisible ceiling is addressed, success will continue to feel unstable, inconsistent and precarious.
Healing the ‘invisible ceiling’ means you can finally stop living with the subconscious belief of ‘I deserve to suffer’ and allow ease, consistency and permission to be free.
And as a bonus you have your business to thank for being the vehicle that transported you to accessing this next level. No wonder they say operating your own business is the greatest personal development tool on the planet.
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About the Author
Mary Toolan is the founder of Scapegoat Child Recovery Ltd and specialises in working with high functioning adults recovering from family scapegoating abuse.
She helps clients stabilise success after No Contact by resolving the attachment trauma and identity-level conditioning that limits expansion, restoring internal safety, coherence, and self-trust.
