Were you the escape goat in your family?

Were you the escape goat in your family?

If you grew up as a scapegoat in a narcissistic family, you are probably an Olympic level athlete at forcing yourself to freeze and override your emotions because that’s what you had to do to survive.

You had to emotionally monitor and placate parents, pretend you were ok when you weren’t, act like the insults and criticism didn’t hurt & shut down your own feelings to protect the narcissistic parent’s ego.

The thing with being stuck in freeze is that most of us are in some form of functional freeze so we overlook it and wonder why we’re emotionally numb or overwhelmed, exhausted, anxious have brain fog or no energy… the list goes on.

Did you ever really come out of it? Most of us healing childhood trauma still have some part of us that can be stuck in freeze.

If you grew up as the escape goat in a narc family here are a few things you my be aware of. 

You may live in a freeze state, typically because the narc parent had an idea of who you were and they projected that on to you and if you disagreed with it there would be consequences. So you had to take on that role they assigned to you whether you like it or not whereby putting yourself in to a forced freeze to survive

You grew up with a lot of forced obedience. Which means as soon as you had a different idea or different feelings about a situation a narcissist typically saw it as a sign of disrespect and disobedience and so you were punished. 

Additionally, it was really hard for you to show dissatisfaction about anything going on in your life putting you back into that forced freeze, because you were not allowed an opinion outside of the narcissist toxic parents opinion. 

You were probably also put in a double bind, causing confusion. They taught you to not need them but then they want to know everything about your life so they can control it or have an opinion about it, which again can put you back into a state of freeze as you don’t know which way to go. 

Lastly, if you had siblings, there was probably damage done there between the relationships between you and your siblings as because if there was the escape goat then there was a golden child. Which means everyone grew up with the scarcity of love attention and care and only those who were selected or met the standards of the narcissist were able to receive it. Which creates a really terrible pattern of competition between siblings as there is only so much to go around they fight for it because as a child you don’t know how to survive.