CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Why Does Every Dysfunctional Family Need A Scapegoat?

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Every dysfunctional family needs somewhere to put the blame, and one person usually ends up holding it for everyone else. Whitney traces the history of the word scapegoat, then walks through the research on why one child gets cast as the family's problem: not because of what they did, but because of what the family needed. Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

They made me the target. I noticed everything and pointed it all out and felt everything extremely deeply. The family loves to make me the bad and problematic member. It's exhausting. I was the golden child for 30 years and became the scapegoat once I stopped offering my blind allegiance and compliance. I'm terrified my child will become this. Welcome back to the Calling On Podcast. I'm Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder of Calling Home. This is the show for people who are breaking patterns and navigating complicated families. Today's episode is about the family scapegoat. Nobody walks into a therapist office and says, I am the container for all of my family's

unprocessed shame. Instead, they'll usually say something like, it feels like everything's always my fault. Or my family knows a version of me that I don't think exists. and it doesn't make sense to me. Or they'll say something like, my sister can do the exact same thing as me and nobody cares or she doesn't get in trouble. Or they say, and this is one of the most common things I hear,

I have spent the last 30 years trying to figure out what is wrong with me, only to find out that I have just been surrounded by people who treat me like absolute garbage. Before we get into this, though, I want to say that not every, family has a scapegoat. Some people grow up in families where there is not a scapegoat because there doesn't need to be one. Plenty of families have some friction and some favorites and difficult

holiday gatherings without any one person being constantly and consistently designated as the problem. The scapegoat role is something that shows up in highly dysfunctional families specifically, and the role gets created to help the adults in the family relieve their stress. There are three groups of people that I think will really benefit from this episode. The first is the scapegoat. If you have spent your entire life feeling like the problem trying to figure out why you're the problem and always being the reason for everything bad in your family, then this is for you.

The second is the person who is married to the scapego. You have watched your partner be blamed. over and over and it doesn't make sense to you. And there's a section in this episode specifically for you. And that third group is some of you are afraid of doing this to your own kids and you don't want to recreate this role in your own families. In this episode, we're going to talk about the history of the word scapegoat, why one person gets put in this role in a dysfunctional family, and what it does to you in adulthood. Then we'll talk about the healing part, which is what we're doing all month in the Family Cycle Breakers Club. October at Calling Home is for the scapegoat.

We have four weeks dedicated to this, a worksheet, an article, and a video and a script every single Monday for members, unlimited support groups with licensed therapists, including a special scapegoat group with me every Wednesday and a Q&A with me. Everything from week one is there waiting for you when you join. And our first group is tomorrow, Wednesday. You can join me at callinghome.com. And the link to join is also in the show notes. Let's go ahead and get into it. The word scapegoat is very old. And it was invented by a translator. In Leviticus 16, there is a day of atonement ritual involving two goats. One goat is killed as an offering. And the other one is symbolically loaded with these sins of the whole community

and released into the wilderness to carry them away. And the second goat isn't given a name of its own. In the research I did, it's described as the goat for a zazel. I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly. But scholars have argued for centuries about what that means. And, you know, It really means that, like, there's a compound word meeting that they say that it could be the goat that departs. But in 1530, William Tyndale was translating the Hebrew Bible into English, which that was illegal at the time and actually cost him his life. And he got to this word.

And he needed something for a goat with no name of its own. So, Scape, which was the ordinary English back then for escape, plus. goat equals scapegoat. And in the original ritual, they don't punish the goat. The goat isn't actually blamed or accused of anything. It just gets loaded up with all these things that it didn't do and sent away from the community so that everybody else can feel clean. But by the early 1800s, scapegoat had evolved into what we mean today, which is a person who takes the blame for others. And in the late 1930s through the 1940s, social psychologists built scapegoat theory to explain prejudice and how groups pick targets. In 1960, two researchers named Ezra Vogel and Norman Bell published a paper called The Emotionally Disturbed Child as a Family Scapegoat.

And that is when the term entered like the family therapy lexicon. They studied families with a disturbed child and found that. something that reorganized the field. The parents were routing their own marital tension onto one kid. And the child's problems were not the family's problem. The child's problems were the family's solution. Murray Bowen, who you heard me talk a lot about during our differentiation month last month in September, especially our members that worked through all of that content, he was working on something similar at the same time. And in early family therapy, this child was called the identified patient. Many of you have probably felt that or heard that term if you were the one in your family

that got sent away to like boarding school or a treatment center or to therapy and no one else had to participate. And the field was slowly realizing that fixing that child wasn't really the assignment because if the child got better, the family would just predict. a new identified patient rather than look at itself. It was using this identified patient as a way to take the stress and put it somewhere that was easier to focus or it made it easier to carry that stress. And Salvador Mnuchin, another person in family therapy that you've probably heard of, later described the mechanism more precisely with a concept called detouring. So two parents in conflict with each other will route their conflict through a child instead.

They don't have to fight each other if they can both be concerned about or angry at the same kid. So you might see this even in families where a child has a chronic illness or a disability. It's not just about making a child have a behavioral issue or something like that or making a child the problem. People can be the quote unquote problem even in. in ways that we would not deem as being profoundly negative in the way that we think about like a kid who is quote, behaving poorly in comparison to a child who is sick with cancer or some other type of diagnosis, that they can serve the same function of detouring for those parents. In the early 80s, we also see Sharon Wigschider describe family roles in alcoholic families.

And these are the roles that you've probably heard of. I've talked about them before, like the hero, the scapegoat, the lost child, the mascot, and a lot of the popular language that we hear today comes from that. So if you're listening to this about yourself, let's talk about why you became the family scapegoat. The strongest findings in this area is that the family unit matters more than the child. So there were two studies published in 2021, and researchers found that the more dysfunctional someone's family of origin was, the more likely they were to report having been the scapegoat. The role tracks the family's condition, not the child's character. And then I looked at another 2020 study where researchers followed families

for over a year through the transition from kindergarten to first grade. This is really interesting. The researchers set out to test minutia's structural family systems theory regarding detouring that we just talked about. So that's the dysfunctional family dynamic where parents manage their own conflict by forming a cross-generational alliance against the child and they turn the child into the scapegoat. When they were looking at this, they found that detouring predicted later increases in that child's behavior problems, their hostility towards other people and their rejection by peers. Now, this is important. It did not work the other way. The child's problems did not predict later detouring. The blaming came first, and then the problems in the child followed. And the data failed to support this child effects model. So child adjustment problems did not predict future detouring. And this confirmed that the direction of influence primarily flows from the dysfunctional parental alliance down to the child. So in planar terms, it's not that you were a problem and you were disrupting your parents' marriage. It's the other way around where the parents' marriage had issues and that was then causing issues

in the child and then the child could be blamed and that detouring could happen. There's also a large meta-analysis that was done in 2025 on parental favoritism and they pooled 30 studies with about 19,000 people in total. and parents tended to give more favorable treatment to children who are more agreeable and more conscientious. So meaning the easier and more rule-following ones, regardless of birth order or gender. And this means that the child whose temperament is harder for a particular parent to manage is more likely to be on the wrong end of this. And we've talked about this before, that some children are more difficult for some parents to raise for a variety of reasons. personality, temperament, the time when the child was born, their position in the family,

what else was going on at that time. I have gone through seasons with my own children where one or more of them is harder during that time than the other, right? And that is no fault of the child. It's just kind of how things go sometimes. Now, what a lot of clinicians report in this area and what I see is that the scapegoat tends to be the one who is different from the rest of the family in some visible way. So they might be very sensitive, chronically ill or disabled. They're neurodivergent, gay or trans, introverted, creative, or they're just not like the rest of the family. And this difference gets noticed, for one, but in highly dysfunctional families, it gets targeted and treated as bad or shameful. The scapegoat also tends to be the person in a family who tells the true.

Ruth about the dysfunctional family out loud for others to see. And if a family is particularly prone to secret keeping, they're trying to hide something, the person who is naming this becomes a threat. And the easiest and cheapest way to handle a threat, especially from a child, is to discredit them and to continue to discredit the person that is making the secret known. I also want to add in here something specific about chronic illness and disability because it came up over and over in the comments about being the scapegoat in your family on a post that I did. I think in a lot of families, a child who is sick or disabled or struggling with their mental health is an easy target because there's something to point at. And I know it's hard to say this and I don't mean this in a derogatory. way at all, but the child who has an illness or a disability or who's sick or struggling in some way

can be fundamentally making, not by their own volition, but they do make family life harder sometimes. There are usually appointments, costs, and strain that develops as a result of that. But that can be said about the child who plays a certain sport. that can be said about the age of a certain child or what their needs are at the time, that all of us demand more attention and resources from the family at certain points throughout the life cycle. But in these dysfunctional families, the family takes a situation that no one chose and makes it that child's fault. So then the stress of being blamed for what they're experiencing often makes the illness or the issue worse. And then the family then uses that as evidence that that child is the

problem. And this is a very cruel and debilitating loop for someone to get stuck in during their life. Many people in this role are also highly empathetic and can also be highly reactive or both. And so it tends to be that people who identify as the scapegoat will report that they feel things intensely, and sometimes that shows up in the way they behave. And dysfunctional families will use that. Okay. So your reaction, especially if your reaction feels big or dramatic to them, becomes the evidence. So you get provoked, you respond. And then your response is what continues to be discussed for the next six months, not the thing that actually pushed you to have that response, right? There's also this version of the scapegoat that I see a lot online. And it's usually that the scapegoat is the most

like emotionally intelligent person in the family. They're an empath. They're a truth teller. And there's not a lot of research on this. I wouldn't be surprised if it was true. But I think that this is a clinical observation. And it's also something that you want to make sure that you don't make your full identity, right? Because sensitivity and reactivity can make a person easier to put into this role because they will react. And a visible reaction is something that the family can use if they need like a problem to point at. But it's also sometimes people can take the scapegoat role, have that role their whole life and try to flip it into something that feels a little bit more positive. And then they get very, very hooked on this like, I'm sensitive.

I'm sensitive. I'm an empath. I'm reactive. I feel everything. And that can also become a very trapping dynamic for some people in like the way that that actually plays out in their life. So it's just something to think about that even though that can feel like a very positive thing to swap in for the scapegoat role, sometimes you are just trying to put yourself into a role and take on a label and that's not the best thing for you. That you want to allow yourself to have some level of flexibility as well. Families under pressure need somewhere to put the pressure. And the person who is different is easier to put the pressure on because the difference sort of makes the story make sense to them. And I want you to remember that this role is not about your worth.

A lot of times it's just about what the family needed. And you were the person that they could put in there for whatever reason, a lot of that not being anything that you could have controlled. Back to what I just said about the role. The scapegoat role is not permanent and it's not always assigned in childhood. You know, there was one of the comments that I read on a post was like, I was the golden child for 30 years and became the scapegoat once I stopped offering my blind allegiance and compliance. And I was talking about like the golden child to scapegoat pipeline. And I did a post on this the other day that, you know, that happens a lot. The role often gets reassigned the moment someone stops cooperating or going along with the script. It also gets reassigned when the scapegoat leaves.

You know, I read through a long thread of people discussing like what happened after they cut contact. And the most common answer by far was that someone else in the family became the scapegoat. Because you have to remember that the family is doing this to maintain homeostasis, to maintain the equilibrium in the family. They're not necessarily doing it because you're the problem and everything's always your fault. It's like anybody could sort of be slotted into that role, right? If anyone can be slotted into the role, the moment it opens, then the role is probably never about you personally. If you understand this segment that I'm going to go into now, a lot of your family's behavior will stop being confusing. So it is very often a child and sometimes

a young one who gets cast as the scapego. And that is not an accident because as we know, children are available, dependent, and they have no real recourse. They can't leave. They can't get a second opinion. And the people that are assigning the role are the same people that they are learning, like, what reality is from. And an adult can push back on a false story about themselves. A six-year-old is just going to absorb it. There was a 2012 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that lays out two separate motives for scapegoating. And this wasn't specifically on families, but I think the mechanisms are similar in families.

So the first motive is guilt. When something has gone wrong and you are partly responsible, blaming someone else protects your view of yourself as a good person. So when someone cannot bear to look at their own contribution to how a child turned out or how a relationship turned out, they have an enormous incentive to locate the problem in the child. The second motive is control. When something has gone wrong and it feels random or chaotic, we really want a clear cause to make the world feel manageable again.

And so a family where it's like there's unstable finances, someone's drinking, the marriage is falling apart, this family is dealing with a lot of uncertainty. And one person to point at takes this from like overwhelming chaos to, okay, we have a clear villain, we have a clear problem, and we can solve this. And we talked about this earlier in the episode that families work to stay the same. Even when staying the same hurts everyone involved. And the scapegoat is ultimately a stabilizer. It's a faulty one. But it does the job that the family at the same, the time is looking for it to do. And as long as someone can be blamed, the family never has to do the overwhelming work of changing. And so this is why the pushback is so intense when you stop

playing along. Because I want you to imagine this. Like when the scapegoat backs out, it's really like you are removing a load-bearing wall from the family home. And everyone's like, oh, my gosh, we need to get a beam up there. We need to figure out something we can put in that place. rather than figuring out why is this house crushing? It's like they just want to stick something up there to fix it quickly. There was also a 2008 paper that looked at siblings of severely scapegoated children. And in many families, the other children identified with the parent and they join in the blaming. And I can't tell you how many times I see this in my comment section and you look out for it and you will see it. there is always a child in the family that will say something like, no, no, no, no, no,

this is different in my family. My brother is horrible. He has made my parents' life a living hell. He has been bad from the start. He always stressed them out. They could never keep up with him. I feel so bad for them. And it is great that he is out of our lives. And so this isn't an excuse for that sibling. But when you see this happening, I really see that as, okay, you needed to see your family like this in order to survive because you probably felt like you could not form an alliance with your sibling because that would mean associating with them and rejection from your parents. Or you feel like you want to be the good one for your parents. You want to stabilize them. You want to make everything okay for them. So you align with them this way. Or if I associate with my brother, then I'm going to be seen as bad. So

this sibling is doing a lot of contorting themselves to see the sibling as bad and the parents as good and seeing the sibling as a problem typically for their entire life because that is easier to sit with a lot of times for the sibling and it allows them to maintain that illusion with their parents. Now, that's not to say that they're not wonderful engaged parents whose children and end up, you know, becoming addicted to substances or making mistakes or doing things. The problem is when all the nuance and gray is lost and we hear the sibling being like, sibling bad, parents amazing, no, nothing in between, no empathy for the experience of the sibling or the role that they might have been cast in or the different experiences that

they had in their life. So that's just kind of something to look out for in your own family is it's a pattern that can happen. And if you're the scapego, you know, your siblings' inability to see what was done to you may be the thing that made them able to survive it. And again, this is just an explanation, but it's often the difference between thinking like your siblings are cruel and understanding that if you grew up in a highly dysfunctional family or a very unsafe home, that they were also children in an unsafe home making the safest

available choice and they were doing something to get attention as well, even if it looked very different than the way you were getting it. I think that family members who carry a lot of shame will also typically unload it onto someone else because having someone else to point at is easier than looking at yourself and sometimes because they are full of shame. They want you to be full of it too. And this is often why people get like the work. worst of it in the moments you would expect someone to be happy for you or excited for you. Because when you're happy, when you're proud of something, when you're openly like enjoying a part of yourself that your family thinks should be hidden, it can be very disorienting to be

punished for that. And usually that is because the other person is so filled with shame or the family unit is is so tightly wound around this like, this is how we have to appear. And and how we have to be. And so we are not going to let you make us feel shameful for not being ourselves or hiding these parts of ourselves. I want you to take this away from this episode, though, that your family is not confused about you. They're not missing information about you.

You are not like this one amazing explanation away from being understood if you are truly the scapegoat in a highly dysfunctional family. the story they have about you and the way they're perceiving you is doing a very important job. And as long as the family needs that role filled and they need that job done, no amount of evidence about you is going to change that. And that's why arguing really doesn't work and you can spend your whole life trying that the family needs to realize that like we cannot function and be healthy as long as we have someone in this scapegoat role and as long as we need that.

And until we say we're no longer going to scapegoat anyone, they're just going to keep subbing someone into that role, whether it's you or someone else. Let's talk about what being the scapegoat does to you. And I think I want partners and spouses to really pay attention to this part of the episode because this is what's going to show up in your current relationship. People who report having been the family scapegoat tend to report more depressive symptoms in adulthood. There was a 2023 study that found that scapegoating was the pathway that connected parental narcissistic traits to anxiety and depression in young adults.

And in a large study of families where mothers were in their 60s and 70s, adult children who perceived that their mother consistently favored or rejected one child had more depressive symptoms in midlife decades after childhood was over. A follow-up study found the same thing when looking at unequal-trial treatment. people simply remembered from childhood. So when a family member tells you to get over it because it was 30 years ago, the research does not back this up. Okay. In that same 2020 detouring study that we talked about earlier in the episode, the children who were targeted by both parents developed what researchers called a hostile attribution bias. So they started reading

neutral situations as hostile. And they also experienced more rejection and victimization by their peers. This is why, you know, if you spent your childhood as like the designated target in your family, you have learned to scan your environment for incoming threat, right? You've probably become very skilled out or even overreactive to detecting blame. And this includes blame that isn't really there. And so you carry that into your marriage and your friendships and your other relationships. And when your partner then says something like neutral about the dishwasher, you're hearing an accusation and you start defending yourself. And so many people who have been scapegoated, especially for a considerable amount of their

life, will do things like apologize before they even know what they're apologizing for. It's hard for them to let people get close to them in their life, you know, because they're hiding like the real. them that is this bad person that they've been told about. You know, small conflict can feel really overwhelming or like it's the start of something worse. And you may also be very suspicious of kindness, like you're being set up for something. There was also a large survey done of self-identified scapegoats. And about a third of them said a family member had called them mentally ill behind their back. And another fifth suspected that that had been done. And this was a lot of

wasn't a peer-reviewed study. This was like people who identified escapegoats, you know, so take that with a grain of salt in that survey. But I think the pattern here is consistent with things that I hear constantly anecdotally, that the family isn't simply blaming you or saying that you're the problem. They are building a case that your perception cannot be trusted. and that neutralizes anything that you might say about them because you're mentally ill, you're the problem, you've always been like this, and it just gets built up over time until there is no ability to break out of that definition. Now, if you're married to the scapegoat and you've seen them get unfairly blamed,

this is a pattern that they talk to you about, I think what you can do is work on, you know, believing them. I think the single most valuable thing a partner can provide someone in a relationship is that like listening to their perspective, trying to understand it. When they're describing what's happening with their family, you can be a person that just is like, I hear you. That makes sense. I think you also have to expect that these people often shrink in their family's presence. And you might watch your partner go from someone like very confident. to someone who's very careful and small and apologetic and you can help them see that without making it a criticism and also support them in that. Now, if you're afraid of doing this to

your children, I think that almost all parents feel some more ease or easier seasons with one child than another, right, based on personality, temperament, their age. The problem around rises when one child becomes the explanation for the household stress. So thinking about, does one child get the blame for things that are structurally not their fault? Like the family's finances, parents being in a bad mood, their marital issues. Do you find yourself telling stories about one child to other adults in a way that you would not want your child to hear? And when something goes wrong, do you look for who did it or do you immediately blame one child? Is one child like always apologizing or always taking the blame? And I think the biggest thing to remember here is repair.

You know, what does more damage than a parent like losing it or overreacting is them rewriting history that that never happened and they have nothing to apologize for. Like you can go back after and say, I was overwhelmed. I took it out on you. I shouldn't have done that. Do you want to talk to me about what happened and try to repair that? You cannot argue your way out of this role. And a lot of people try to. They try to convince their family and bring all this evidence and argue for why they should not be the scapegoat, essentially. But the family is dysfunctional. And the family is dysfunctional. family needs the role filled. And sometimes your explanations just become more material for their story about you. I think some of you hold your recovery from this a little bit hostage because you're

waiting for an apology or a shift that might not be coming. And you can be free before they admit or change anything. So here's what we're doing this October inside the family cycle breakers club for the scapegoats. Week one is about why you became the scapegoat. Week two is why your family needed someone in that role and what everyone else got out of having you to blame. Week three is how to step out of that role. So how to get the family's voice out of your head and build a kinder one in its place, how to be your own person and stop going into that role when they ask you to and when they need you to. Week four, we are going to. We are going to, going to be using like the strongest evidence that we have for treating complex trauma from

childhood. And that is more of a phased approach. So building skills for handling emotions and relationships and then also talking about what happened. So how can you respond without taking the bait? How can you tell when you are recreating that role at work or in your relationships? and what to do when your family keeps trying to cast you in this role? Because their behavior may never change, but you can decide whether you accept the part. And so there will be worksheets, articles, videos, those scripts for the conversations that are hard to have every Monday. There will also be a Wednesday group with me about the scapegoat role.

You will have access to unlimited support groups with our other therapists and our other topics, our anonymous discussion boards. and a Q&A with me. So before we end officially today, let's go back to that goat that we started the episode with. In the ritual, the goat gets loaded with things that do not belong to the goat and then is sent out into the camp so everyone else can feel clean. The goat didn't do anything. The community needed that weight, that shame to go somewhere.

So it put it on something that could carry it out of sight. If that was your role in the family, you were not chosen because of what is wrong with you. You were probably chosen because you were different, you noticed things, or because your temperament was just harder for that particular parent, or because you were simply there and a child who couldn't leave when the family needed somewhere to put the weight. The research shows us that blaming came first and your problems came later, not the reverse. And so whatever difficulty you had, it is secondary to what was happening to you. The family isn't missing information about you.

The story about you is doing a job. And that's why arguing your way out of this role doesn't work. And there's also this fine... line for people who have been scapegoated in their families to learn healthy accountability and responsibility and learning when things are actually not their fault or theirs to carry. And October at Calling Home is all about this. We started on October 5th, so that is Monday yesterday. And if you're hearing this episode today or after that, don't worry, you haven't missed anything. Everything from week one is there,

waiting for you. And our group starts tomorrow on Wednesday. Thank you for being here. If this episode meant something to you, if it was helpful, please send it to somebody who needs it and leave us a review or a comment or a like that really helps us grow the show. Thank you again so much for listening. I will be back on Thursday with a Q&A episode. And I hope to see you in a group inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club. Bye. is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Collingholm or Whitney Goodman.

For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes' terms of service linked in the show notes below.