Scapegoats Among Us
Beyond “Immature” Parents and “Selfish” Children: The Finger-Pointing Reaction Fueling Family Cut-off
Dear Kathy,
You and others write about an adult child’s need to estrange themselves in order to separate and individuate. Ok, I can see why an adult child needs to do that. But why do they need to make the parents so bad in the process? It’s one thing to need distance, like moving 2000 miles away so it requires planning and a plane flight to see each other, but why so negative? It’s almost as if they need a scapegoat in order to step away. And, if that’s true, why is it happening with such ferocity and frequency? I know there is a cultural trend, but still!!??
— Not Wishing to be a Scapegoat
Dear Not Wishing,
You ask a very important question about our collective need for scapegoats. It seems that in the landscape of estrangement, there is active finger-pointing. Across the generations, family members are frequently casting one another into rigid, negative roles to explain the need for rifts in their relationships. Personal flaws are quickly recharacterized as psychological deficits, individuals are labeled as narcissistic or borderline, and mental health diagnoses are frequently hurled across the divide. In the case of these rapid diagnoses in particular, I blame—see? There’s my own scapegoat—I blame the internet for making clinical labels so readily available without the necessary, responsible descriptions and warnings.
Scapegoats serve us when we cannot find the bandwidth to take responsibility ourselves. We wish to eject our difficult feelings outside of our own skin, hoping that someone else will take the blame. The image of the scapegoat comes from the Old Testament, where a goat was burdened with the community’s collective guilt and cast out into the barren wilderness, symbolically carrying away the sins of the population.
In modern terms, we still use scapegoats to unjustly weigh down an individual, group, or entity with faults, mistakes, or wrongdoings. This concept is incredibly useful in explaining the current phenomenon of estrangement, where an outside force is often designated as the cause of our personal discomfort.
In asking this question, you have highlighted a deeply painful period in the lives of families today: the widespread need that adult children are expressing for cut-off. There is a well-understood developmental need for a young person to separate—a vital stage of growth termed Identity vs. Role Confusion by psychologist Erik Erikson in 1950, though present for centuries before. Most of my readers will recognize this fluid, turbulent phase in their own histories.
What I hope to explain is how that healthy, normal developmental need has shifted from a phase we all recognize into something as absolute as a total relational cut-off. And I want to see if I can explore our situation without simply pointing fingers outside of ourselves.
Let’s start with how we are handling our analysis of this situation. Blame is currently being placed everywhere—within the family as well as on technology and society at large. Yet, where there are many locations of responsibility, we may be overlooking our own personal contributions to this phenomenon. When we look closer at this cultural moment, a striking pattern emerges: there are many scapegoats in our dialogue about estrangement.
We are living in a climate of dissatisfaction, where both generations are locked in painful, reciprocal blame, using similar language to describe one another:
From the adult child’s perspective, parents are often seen as immature, narcissistic, lacking psychological awareness, or self-involved.
From the parent’s perspective, adult children are frequently viewed as insensitive, coddled, withholding, unkind, or even cruel.
And collectively, society and culture are cast as external villains, with social media, smartphones, and a hyper-individualism being blamed as the authors of the family rupture.
I want to be clear that I believe the above list includes very real contributors—it’s just that the challenges are within us as well as outside us.
The reality is that the adult children I talk with are working hard at “adulting.” It is not easy, and there is a great deal of quiet suffering involved. Many are trying to look entirely confident in their choices, yet they are often left secretly needing the very support and guidance they felt forced to cut off in order to feel independent.
At the same time, the parents I talk with are also distressed and uncomfortable. Many have lost their planned-for parental and grandparental roles while simultaneously navigating the everyday realities of aging, retirement, and a challenging social and political climate. Are our scapegoats truly helping us with our challenges?
The Universal Reflex to Offload Pain (to Scapegoat)
What does a scapegoat actually offer us? At its core, a scapegoat is a psychological relief valve. Humans have a low tolerance for sitting with uncomfortable internal anxiety. When life feels overwhelming, unpredictable, or deeply unsatisfying, looking inward and holding those responses is painful.
We look for an outside object to receive our “bad feelings,” so we don’t have to experience the weight of them within ourselves.
For a young adult trying to forge an identity in a challenging world, it can make sense to point backward and say, “I am unhappy because of how I was raised.”
For a parent watching a beloved child walk away, it is an equally powerful survival instinct to point outward and say, “My family is broken because of technology or an entitled generation.”
By placing the locus of the trouble in an external source, both sides offer themselves temporary psychological relief. The narrative shifts from internal vulnerability to a neat, orderly analysis: I am OK, and you are the problem.
No One is Winning
The tragedy of this moment is that everyone is participating in the same script, but not arriving at a collaborative conclusion. The adult child’s goal—the search for autonomy and a stable identity—is entirely legitimate. The parent’s goal—the desire for connection, meaning, and mutual respect—is also entirely legitimate.
But if we lack the relational tools to help these two competing, necessary goals meet in the middle, the system freezes. Instead of a gradual, messy developmental step into adulthood, we wind up with the phenomenon of cut-off. We don’t have space to value each other’s inner worlds because we do not know how to be in the complicated space of being different while staying connected.
Maturity for both a parent and an adult child begins when we drop our scapegoats. It happens when we realize that our parents, our children, and even our smartphones are not all-powerful forces responsible for our struggles. Until we can stand confidently in our own lives, owning our struggles and sitting with our shadows without needing an adversary to blame, we will find it difficult to process the very anxieties we are trying to cast away.
How to Rescue Ourselves from the Scapegoat Trap
Within yourself:
Notice when you blame something outside yourself. This is vastly different from seeking an explanation. Fuller explanation includes an accounting of our own actions—blame looks only outward.
Observe the desire to avoid personal “fault.” Victimhood is a highly prevalent identity in modern culture—and who doesn’t feel like a victim sometimes? But remaining in a passive, wounded position rarely brings us to a solution that offers a possibility for future growth.
Ask yourself if there is something you could learn about yourself by taking in what your “scapegoater” is telling you. There may be useful truths within their complaints that could help your relationship.
Work on listening to others, even if it’s painful. We don’t love to hear these truths about ourselves, but we can grow by saying “Ouch”, recovering, and working to take in the information.
Finding and Keeping Your Center to Find Clarity:
Engage in intentional, mindful movement. Practices like breathwork, yoga, swimming, or dedicated walking help slow down a racing mind. This physical centering allows us to cultivate a perspective that exists outside of our immediate emotional reactivity and to look within.
Ensure your self-care contains a return to internal rhythm. Build routines that actively nurture you, giving you the replenishment you need to re-find balance when it eludes you and the temptation of a scapegoat beckons.
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So, Dear Not Wishing,
I wish this for you as well—to not be a scapegoat, and to choose to not welcome one of your own. The more you can find your own balance, anchored by a broadened perspective, the more you will be able to experience a kind of centeredness that will steady you as you walk through your days.
Best,
Kathy
P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html
Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com
This is column #43
And then there's always cognitive dissonance.....