The scapegoat isn't the weakest. They're the strongest.

My posts always seem to get lost in the void, but I have been thinking this for a while and I’m going to share it anyway. Maybe it will help someone else. Maybe it is just me deluding myself into feeling good about what happened to me.

The scapegoat is made to feel like the weakest link in the chain. The source of the family system’s problems. You’re made to feel broken. Defective. Bad. Everything is somehow your fault. Even when you know it isn’t, they’re so insistent you begin to question yourself. You think there’s just something about you that hurts people, even when you don’t mean it. You begin to live in fear of yourself. You begin to control who you are. You can never relax anymore, because you might do something bad, like you just can’t help yourself.

I have been working through Healing the Shame that Binds You and the author talks about how toxic shame is offloaded onto children because the adults can’t process it. If you’ve ever watched Survivor, there’s a challenge where one person stands with a pole over their shoulders and the other team loads bags of sand onto to pole until the person can’t bear the weight anymore.

I picture the scapegoat as that person, carrying the weight for everyone else in the family. No one else carries it. We do. They gave us more and more, and we still carried it. I don’t know what it is, maybe they can sense something in us subconsciously. But they know we will bear the weight of their unresolved issues for them. Even when it ruins our life and steals our sanity, we bear it.

When we were never good enough for their love, we still tried to find a way to connect with them, even though they didn’t deserve it. We wanted to please them, we wanted them to be happy. They took our love and compassion, the goodness in our hearts, and exploited it for their own gain. Like vampires, they sucked us dry of all our goodness because they didn’t have any, and our supply from within was like a fruitful spring that just kept on giving.

My empathy was also the reason my family hated me, because I could see through all the bullshit. I was perceptive, I could see the truth, I could feel, I could sense hypocrisy, and I was solution-oriented. All of those things are the bane of people who want to keep living in denial, so they turned it around and made my strengths, my gifts, into weaknesses.

When we can barely function from effects of neglect and abuse, we still went to school, we still tried to have relationships, we still tried to be normal. We couldn’t focus, we were dealing with too much on our own. But we got up and carried on and made do. We were resourceful and we were resilient.

Scapegoats have been so overburdened with other people’s unhealed wounds that they don’t even see how amazing they are.

Strong.

Resilient.

Resourceful.

Conscientious.

Intelligent.

Honest.

Compassionate.

Loving.

I felt weak. But I carried the pain and shame of generations on my shoulders. Each generation offloading it to the next, until it got to me. I could bear it all. No one else could carry it. Only I was capable of holding it without losing myself. Only I had the love and the strength to be the parent to myself and the rest of my family. I was responsible, I was empathetic, I was forgiving. Even when I had no reason, no one to learn it from. It’s who I am. And they could never take it from me. Never break me for good.

So if you ever feel weak, remember. This is a sign you’re the strong one.