Am I the Family Scapegoat? Signs Your Family Gave You the Role

Why the family scapegoat gets blamed no matter what she does, and what the role does for everyone else in the family.

A woman can be trusted at work and taken seriously by her friends and still feel sick when the family group chat starts up. She already knows how the next disagreement is going to end, everyone will agree she's the reason it happened. For years she's tried to fix it by softening her tone before holiday dinners and apologizing first for arguments she didn't start, and her family still describes her the same way they did when she was fourteen. When the treatment stays the same no matter what she does differently, the likeliest explanation is a role her family assigned her, and the name for the role is family scapegoat.

People use black sheep and scapegoat as if they're interchangeable, and they describe two different situations. A black sheep is the relative who went her own direction, moved across the country or married someone her parents didn't pick. The friction with her family comes from a real difference she chose. Her parents picked the scapegoat for the job, sometimes before she could talk, and the family's problems get blamed on her whether or not she had any part in them. The word comes from an old religious ritual in which a priest laid the community's sins on a goat and sent it into the wilderness so the people left behind could feel clean. A family does something close to it with one child, handing her the blame for a bad marriage or a father's drinking so nobody has to look at either one directly.

The Double Standard

Finding common ground can ease things between a black sheep and her parents, but it does nothing for a scapegoat. The family needs someone to blame, if she stopped being available for it, somebody would have to talk about the father's temper or the mother's unhappiness. She can be reasonable at every family dinner for years and still be treated as the problem, because her behavior isn't the reason she was picked.

The clearest sign is a double standard everyone in the family follows and nobody will admit to. When she argues with her mother, the argument is her fault regardless of what her mother said first. Her brother can argue with their mother and the family decides he was stressed from work. Their parents might cover his rent through a layoff and lend him $4,000 toward a car he hasn't paid back. The one time she asked for help with a security deposit gets brought up at Thanksgiving for the next ten years.

Things she did at twelve or sixteen come up at dinner as evidence about who she is at forty, and a lie about where she was one night in high school gets retold as if it happened last month.

Her father's bad mood after work was her fault, so were her sister's failing grades, and decades later she's still the explanation when anything goes wrong at a family event, including ones she had nothing to do with.

Pointing any of it out gets her called too sensitive or a liar, and the conversation moves to her mental state instead of whatever she was describing. A sibling can make cutting comments through an entire holiday dinner without anyone saying a word. When she finally snaps back, her reaction becomes the story the family tells afterward, with the comments that started it left out. Over the years the family's account of what happened changes, her mother remembers being patient through years she spent screaming at her. If the daughter remembers it differently, she's told she's making things up.

When Competence is Treated as a Trick

Most scapegoats learned as children to keep their feelings and plans to themselves. Anything they shared, a crush or a college they wanted to apply to, turned into a joke at their expense or came back up in the next argument. Plenty of them grew up to be the most attentive adults in their families, they can tell from a parent's voice on the phone whether a visit is going to go badly. The family still describes them as selfish.

Her accomplishments get treated with suspicion. A promotion or a graduate degree gets a change of subject, or a comment about how good she is at impressing strangers, as though everyone outside the family had been fooled. A daughter in this role might find out years later a parent spent her whole childhood telling aunts and family friends she was difficult and couldn't be trusted. Relatives she barely knew had made up their minds about her before she was old enough to give them a reason. A lot of women in this role call it imposter syndrome, she's good at her job and still expects to be found out, because her family spent twenty years treating her competence as a trick.

The Cost of Stepping Back

In some families she was the only child taken to a counselor, brought in so a professional could find out what was wrong with her while nobody looked at her parents' marriage. Relatives who agree with her in private say nothing when the family is together, or they join in. An aunt might admit her mother has been hard on her for years, a cousin might have seen what happened at the wedding, and both of them know defending her means the parent's anger turns on them next.

As an adult she'll explain simple decisions far past what anyone asked for. She gives four reasons she has to leave a party at nine, or a paragraph on why she can't drive her mother to an appointment on Tuesday, because she grew up with everyone assuming her motives were bad. In plenty of families she's the one doing the driving anyway, picking up prescriptions and waiting through appointments. The sibling who gets the benefit of the doubt lives two states away and calls on holidays.

When she cuts back on contact, the guilt comes right away, and so does the family's explanation to everyone else, which is that she's cold and ungrateful and got what she deserved. If stepping back means she stops doing all that driving, her mother tells the extended family she was abandoned, and the years of being blamed for everything before it don't come up.

If you recognize yourself in most of this, compare how your family describes you with how you're described by people who know you as an adult. A manager who gives you the difficult accounts and a friend who calls you first when something goes wrong have no reason to need you to be the problem. When their description doesn't match your family's, theirs is the more accurate one.

Further Reading

If you want to look closer at how a family uses one person to avoid dealing with its own problems, read more about how the whole family setup works.

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