Why therapy helped but didn’t fully resolve it

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How your family of origin interacted with you is something that has been a cause of continuous pain your entire life.  You’ve lived through the trauma of being forced to go No Contact with them.  

You’ve a long list of practitioners, therapists and other professionals you’ve seen over the years and decades.  Each helped in their own way but there’s still a gap.  

You feel you’re an expert on the psychological intricacies of dysfunctional families and the role of the scapegoat child.  You could write a book on it, in fact, you’ve considered writing your memoir.  

Something lingers.  You’re not out of the woods yet.  The pain still surfaces.  It seems to be immune to any help.  It’s stealth - like a soldier behind enemy lines who’s managed to evade capture.  No form of therapy you’ve tried has touched this pain. 

It’s an ache inside.  An existential loneliness. 

And your experience is that  ‘nobody gets it’. 

At times it feels like being a frightened 9 year old child standing in the middle of Times Square left all alone to survive.  “Where’s mom?” the little child cries. 

The feeling catches you off guard every now and then, perhaps at the weekend or holidays.  And other parts of you jumps in to quench the flames. 

“Keep busy, don’t feel” orders the survival parts.  

This is the residue of complex childhood trauma as a result of family scapegoating abuse.  Most, if not all of my clients have worked with countless professionals throughout their life and still feel pockets of stuck-ness and emotional pain that affect certain areas of their life.  

Paradoxically, all are high functioning, holding down positions of leadership, CEO’s, entrepreneurs and are extremely creative and capable.  On the outside, it very much looks like they have their sh&t together. 

Family scapegoating abuse is the ultimate attachment trauma. 

The scapegoat child is rejected by the parents, siblings, immediate and extended family and there’s nothing in the world they can do to change this.  They were powerless as a child to resolve this rejection, and are powerless as an adult to do anything to be accepted. 

Humans are hard wired to belong.  To a child, belonging is oxygen.  Without it, the child lives in a constant state of hyper vigilance and survival.  It’s exhausting.  

The wound created by this scapegoating trauma is existential. 

Not just traumatic, not just a ‘limiting belief’, not just ‘insecure attachment’, not just feeling lost, not just addictions to mask pain. 

It’s full-on rejection of who you are as a person.  The family scapegoat is never known by their parents, never seen, listened to, acknowledged, witnessed and certainly not celebrated…and never will be.   

“You are not welcome here” is the message.  

Most conventional healing approaches are not designed to resolve this layer of attachment trauma.

Imagine throwing a pebble into a pond.  You can see the outward ripples from the impact of the pebble.  Conventional approaches work with the outer rings of the trauma - and that’s helpful and valid.  

However, they don’t always have the wherewithal to successfully tackle the core wound - because this requires precise language, knowledge, a specific type of intervention and a relationship where the client doesn’t have to brace for misunderstanding. 

And that’s why your healing is still on-going two, three, four decades on.  

Healing from family scapegoating abuse requires releasing the false identity required to survive the toxic family unit, calming the protective strategies (workaholism, over-functioning, feast-famine cycles, freeze responses etc.) and accessing the vulnerable exiled parts and healing these at the root.  It taps into existential territory and it’s a reclamation of identity.  It’s rewiring the nervous system.  It’s work most people never have to take on - because the identity they had at birth was never colonised.  

This work requires a specific type of internal reconstruction.

It’s about restoring internal safety at its root.

Insight alone doesn’t resolve this. Understanding alone doesn’t resolve this. 

The wound wasn’t created through thinking.  It was created through lived experience. The child who was left alone is still waiting.  

Resolution comes from working directly with that part of you, where the original injury occurred.

This is where real healing begins.

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About the Author 

Mary Toolan is the founder of Scapegoat Child Recovery Ltd and specialises in working with adults recovering from family scapegoating abuse. She helps clients resolve the attachment trauma that remains even after years of therapy, restoring internal safety, identity and self-trust.

Learn more about her 1:1 work.