What to Do When Your Family Blames You

Image by Jonatan Pie

Do You Blame Yourself for Everything?

Many trauma victims of psychological narcissistic abuse find their families siding with their abuser. This article outlines a Mindful way of coping.

Using the way others hurt us to turn inwards with kindness and compassion can become a useful habit. Going through the pain of narcabuse, rather than running from it or suppressing it; allowing ourselves to feel the pain in our bodies, minds and hearts; can lead to tremendous post-traumatic growth.

Mindfulness, when combined with self-compassion, teaches us to use the hurtful projections of others as impetus for getting closer to our own good heart. Others’ behaviour can become a mirror we use to reflect back at us the things we also do to cause harm. We start to notice when we are blaming another rather than face our own part in a thing. We notice the moments when we run off at the mouth and spread our opinions as if they were fact. We notice when it is our own fear feeding accusations that turn out to be false – and we learn to hold back our judgemental knee-jerk reactions to another’s outrage long enough to be capable of seeing a situation differently.

I’m sure there are many families for whom a built-in scapegoat becomes a handy receptacle for everyone’s blame. When a family member is different from the unspoken group rules of conformity, it’s pretty easy for a group to form a dynamic of blame that reactively proclaims, “oh, no, what’s he/she done this time?”

This easy out saves anyone in the group from having to distract themselves from their day to day responsibilities long enough to notice that scapegoating is, in fact, what they are doing. This reactiveness to one group member feels natural and normal to them, since it is the established group dynamic.

Families with this kind of group dynamic deliver enormous pain to struggling victims of narcabuse and its subsequent trauma. The group effectively ostracises the victim, and become more cohesive against the ostracised group member. This can feel like an unjust and painful onslaught for the ostracised person, who needs the group for their own survival, but finds their cries of pain fall on deaf ears.

They suffer the Pecked Chicken Phenomenon.

Where this dynamic has existed subtly for years in a family group, the individual who doesn’t fit the mold can internalise the blame and become a person who blames themselves for everything. With every incidence of unfair blame and possibly being made to apologise for things they should not have to apologise for (like career choice, partner choice, mental or physical health issues), the outsider can become someone who feels guilt and shame at the slightest disapproval from their ‘survival’ group.

The outsider feels the rejection of the group, cannot rationalise the rejection and so experiences nothing but confusion. These cumulative rejections get stored in our bodies and can prolong and exaggerate trauma if it happens to us.

This is why trauma victims need to trawl through a lifetime of hurts, not just the ones delivered to them by their abuser. This is why we have therapists!

If the rejected group member tries to express their pain and confusion, the group will only hear this as criticism of the group dynamic they are comfortably sitting inside. They do not recognise cries of pain and pleas to stop the judgement, criticism and blame, and will only deliver more of it to the ostracised individual. They cannot remove the beam from their own eyes before they point out the speck in another’s. (Matthew 7:5) They become the pot calling the kettle black. They are deeply offended and reactive to any suggestion that what they have been doing is precisely what they accuse the outsider of doing.

This is where Mindfulness and the theory of turning inwards becomes helpful for us – the ostracised. We learn to respond to a sudden stab of pain (an interpersonal trigger) by taking more care not to do that ourselves in future. We become more aware and more alert with our own speech, our own judgmental attitudes, and ways in which we deliver feedback to people.

We learn not to believe everything we think.

We learn to notice our biases, reserve our judgement until we have gathered more information, and keep schtumb until we have something kind and compassionate to contribute.

I think there is enough evidence out there to confirm that most narcabuse victims are empaths. That is, highly sensitive people who not only see other people’s moods and emotions but feel them deeply, as if they were their own. We suffer over other people’s suffering, and can despair over other people’s behaviour towards us – not only because it hurts us, but because we can see how it hurts them too. We can see the blind judgers, criticisers and blamers digging themselves into a hole of anger, indignation and resentment – even as we diffuse our own strong emotions at having been cast out.

To end this dysfunctional group dynamic, we can take the Buddha’s advice and “drive all blames into one”. When we are strong enough and can again bear weight in our souls, we can take the blame of the group, aware of the dysfunction, mindful of the injustice, and without submitting to our old habit of blaming ourselves too. This requires Radical Acceptance.

Like a person imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit. We must accept that the group will never see the beam in their own eye. They have the comfort of a group to justify their blindness. We must wear their blame like a cloak that will become lighter and lighter with time. We must overcome the guilt and shame because our survival group wasn’t up to the task of witnessing the dysfunctional group dynamic when we needed them most.

And if we must, we let go of the survival group from which we have already been ostracised and stand on our own two feet alone in the wilderness.

We can rejoice in the tribe of non-judgemental, highly compassionate and empathic people we found on our long journey into the light. We can rejoice in the new, healthy self-image that our self-compassion has brought us, and shrug off the ugly image our old group projected onto us.

For many of us, the new purpose we find in helping others who have suffered in the same way also becomes a primary focus- a life purpose. Instead of the never-ending loop of devaluing, sabotaging and blaming ourselves, mindfulness and post-traumatic growth has us create a new loop; new neural pathways leading back to our own good hearts.

We find ourselves walking a new path. This path leads to a life that is filled with kindness, courage, compassion and a new survival group to whom we truly belong.

 ©Margot MacCallum