On Being Scapegoated when you try to address pain

Anyone else out there in cyber world relate to the experience in their family of being the scapegoat or trying to open up some dialogue around psychological truths only to be dismissed, questioned and invalidated?  Apparently those who try to bust open and question the family dynamic and its dysfunction are often doomed to be exiled in some way.  Its a little like being the child telling the emperor he is naked and doesn’t really have any clothes on.

Today I made the mistake of trying yet again (oopps? well not really, (later re-dit) sometimes in the words of songsmith John Mayer you need to say what you need to say, regardless).  So to continue, today I tried to address abusive, troubling things that occurred to me at the hands of my sister and mother quite some years ago and led to a traumatic accident.

It was made clear to me that by now I should have let it go, got on with life and thought more about things from their perspective.  Along the way I confronted my Mum about reading my personal journals and violating my boundaries in other ways which had a serious negative impact.  Instead of tears, (her usual defence) this time I got the death stare.  I started to feel really sick inside, I was expressing anger and asserting my truth and was being demonised for that, I used the “F” word a real no no and apparently was shouting (really I think I was just speaking loudly) so accused of showing no R.E.S.P.E.C.T. to my elders.

You want my goddam respect, start the fuck showing some empathy for my feelings, trying to understand why I feel the need to shout in a family that is doing its very damdest NOT to hear what I am trying to say, putting a dismissive spin on it, viewing my claims with contempt  while turning the tables around to make me look like the bad guy for expressing deep pain over nasty, hurtful things fired at me at a time of extreme emotional vulnerability now denied or which you claim to have forgotten or have no memory of.

What about trying to understand that being angry would be a fairly human response to being abused and then having that abuse denied or disregarded.  But really I should wake the fuck up.  Isn’t this fairly text book narcissistic behaviour? There’s a name for this tactic.  Gaslighting.

The truth is my sister could now have no memory of saying my life was worth shit, due to subsequent shock treatment administered to take her out of the depressive phase of her bi polar emotional roller coaster. Am I now sounding narcissistic and dismissive or insensitive?  You go stepping over others emotional boundaries and being an emotional bully, at some point life is going to put the stops on you.  I most certainly did not feel anything but sadness and pain for her the entire time I knew the shock treatment was being administered, despite hurtful things dumped on me following the end of my marriage. I  was having bad physical symptoms at the time due to being acutely plugged into the family energy field, but of course this idea was also mocked and disparaged today when I was accused of a lack of care, insensitivity and lack of empathy. I  had so much fucking empathy it was making my life a living hell and I was the one fronting up to support both women through not less than seven hospitalisations.

Today was a lesson for me.  They have not one clue of the affect of their treatment upon me, how it has been to be subject to insensitive treatment, and to have tried to keep loving despite that, fronting up due to the fact I loved my family and longed too for their attention and love, only to be kicked in the teeth later with such accusations.

I was so fucking angry today.  I have had the past four years of acute twisting symptoms and  in the last week on some days I have been almost totally immobilised.  As an astrologer I have been noting that in the next two weeks the planet Venus, Saturn and Uranus are making stations, Venus and Uranus are stationing to move retrograde in Virgo and Aries and Saturn will be stationing to move forward in the final degrees of Scorpio on 1 August.

The entire Venus retrograde period is noted for bringing to a head past painful relationships patterns, wounds, injuries and conflicts that need to be explored, healing and forgiven.  This transit will take place in the second half of Leo and reactive my own Venus Neptune square.

Transiting Uranus is in my eighth house ruled by Aries and Aries ruler Mars natally is conjunct Saturn and the Moon in Aquarius in my sixth house.  Uranus transiting the eight usually has to do with an awakening of shadow energies that have been repressed or need transformation.  Saturn on Mars puts a block on healthy self expression, assertion and energy expression in the service of the self.  With the Moon the emotional energies are intensified while also repressed and somatised in the body.  Saturn Moon  also brings tough lessons with lack of emotional support, comfort, understanding and nurture which need to be addressed in order to bring the advocacy for the self within the self.  Saturn transiting the house naturally ruled by the Moon (the fourth) brings learnings around the foundation of self and relationship with family, nurture and mothering.  From what I have read it is a time when one is thrown back on the self and makes a necessary break with past familial patterns, especially multi-generational ones.

The anger with my Mum today was even more powerful as she called into question my feeling for her, my consideration for her.  This hurt me deeply.  No one in the family has been more aware of the painful impact of the past on my Mum of the impact of the lack of nurture.  My older siblings had a easier time as they had more of both my mother and father’s time.  Being the youngest meant being raised in a family with was not really a family but more of a business enterprise in which two siblings were powerfully aligned with mother and father while two siblings (myself and my older sister, Jude who died last year) were left on the outside. Mum’s lonely emotionally barren childhood was repeated in my own life, something she, in her softer more vulnerable naked moments has acknowledged.

Despite the fact things didn’t go well today and the confrontation was painful, I managed to speak for my own emotional truth, it wasn’t validated, it was questioned, denied, defended against and attempts were made to divert, deflect and manipulate in a host of subtle and not so subtle ways.  A few years ago I would have lost my hold on my own psychic reality.  The threat of banishment would have been too hard to cope with and I would have buckled under as was the pattern in my last relationship with a narcissist.  In truth I had not achieved the psychic separation from my own family of origin.  The pain of that failed relationship and shit dumped on me bought me back here to the scene of the crime in order to understand its nature.

Saturn brings out the emotional secateurs that are necessary for us to cut off what is dead and establish road blocks against painful tactics which could enmesh, ensnare and entrap us.  Mars when lived and expressed in the service of the Sun gives us the will to fight and to stand our own emotional ground, knowing what is true for us is real, even if others around us are invested in denying that truth.

There must be rich gifts for the scapegoat.  The goat is sent out into the wilderness with a burden of sin (really the shadow stuff which has gone underground or could not be expressed in the family).  It we don’t identify as victims but more as warriors and survivors we can explore new territory.  The longing for the comfort of family and security recedes if the cost is too high in terms of emotional integrity and so the goat has to be hard and tough even if it has a soft underbelly in order to live its truth.  And there are a lot of other scapegoats out there so we can be in good company.

The price of our exile from the collective or family is a new kind of homecoming, one in which we get to live securely within the circumference of our own circle.  The pain of exile will be the price of new life in the wilderness and we set down new seeds in what appears to be fallow ground but beautiful flower such as orchids do better in this kind of climate.  We are scarred and yet not broken but we remain whole if we don’t turn against ourselves by buying into projections that are not accurate.  The price of not belonging in the family becomes the price of belonging to ourselves and who knows, in time the scapegoat is probably recognised, perhaps even secretly envied? Perhaps not.

I am going to close this with the following quote which I came across while researching the effects of emotional invalidation.  It speaks to things I have been expressing here:

I am realizing how emotional invalidation goes beyond one’s emotions, and has a hugely painful affect on the self.  How are we to know who we are if the people closest to us tell us that we are wrong for feeling what we feel, being who we are, and doing what we do?  And I know: that we are all essentially alone, that we have to define our own selves, that others cannot decide for us what path to follow.

Source:  http://www.practiceofmadness.com/2014/02/effects-emotional-invalidation/