The Gas Light & The Scapegoat

Gaslightling

In case you aren’t already familiar with ‘Gaslighting’, we’re going to start off with where this term came from and what it means:

“The term gaslight comes from the play Gas Light, by Patrick Hamilton. The play tells the story of a cunning man who attempts to convince his devoted wife she is going insane. He hides and moves various articles in their home and, when she notices, tells her she either lost the items or moved them herself but can’t remember. The husband’s goal is to secretly increase his own fortune by stealing his wife’s inheritances. When she sees the gas lights in her room fading and is led to believe it’s not really happening, she starts to question her own sanity.”-psycom.net

“Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation. To gaslight, someone is to sow seeds of doubt in their mind that makes them question their sense of personal truth and reality. Things like memory, judgment, perceptions, feelings, etc… It is to try to convince someone that what they see, they didn’t see, what they hear, they didn’t hear, and what they felt, they had no reason to feel.” — Teal Swan

I haven’t seen the play but I did watch the 1944 movie Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman (it’s a horror movie, as it should be) and it is terrifying (as it should be). The first thing I noticed was how controlling and overbearing the husband was, and how he kept her isolated. This movie really triggered me!

Why would someone do this? Why would someone want to gaslight someone else? You might wonder.

“A child that is bright, intuitive, feels the energy, inquisitive, picking up on things, asking questions, truth teller. This is a huge liability for a dysfunctional family unit. The child is shamed into silence. The parents are going to be very triggered by this child, get angry with this child. Mocking, endless criticism “you are bad and wrong”, bullying, trying to break the child’s spirit. The siblings get brainwashed to view the scapegoat child as “bad”. Everyone in the family gets the green light to view the family scapegoat with contempt and treat them with hatred. You can see this contempt in the eyes. This is Emotional Violence. There is an invalidation in the Scapegoat’s experience.” — Mary Toolen

“The goal is always to weaken resistance, break spirits, appear blameless, and create chaos and confusion in the mind of the “gaslight-tee.” Gaslighting isn’t an isolated or occasional event. It’s an insidious and persistent pattern of behavior that keeps you questioning yourself and those around you while slowly eroding your self-esteem and even your identity. There are two main reasons why a gaslighter behaves as they do,” Sarkis explains. “It is either a planned effort to gain control and power over another person, or it because someone was raised by a parent or parents who were gaslighters, and they learned these behaviors as a survival mechanism.” -psycom.net

Now, in the movie, the reason why the man was gaslighting his wife was because he wanted to prove her insane because he wanted her money. In my case, my mother was trying to convince herself (& others) that she was a “good” mother by making me “wrong” and “bad”. The Wounded Ego is a powerful force. It’s hard for people to have a light shined on their shadow (pain). I think I embodied certain aspects (sensitivity, as one example; creativity, as another), aspects my mother had buried deep within herself, and seeing these aspects expressed in me brought up very uncomfortable feelings for her, shame in particular, and she didn’t know how to handle it. I think she had this idea of how she wanted her daughter (a “good” daughter) to be and I was completely different. I think she was a young mom, unprepared for motherhood, carrying her own trauma (my mother once told me she was the black sheep of her family), with an absent husband (no support). I think she was overwhelmed and too ashamed to ask for help so making me bad and wrong was the only way to preserve her self own self image. My mother’s big thing was that she wanted desperately to be seen as a “good mother”, she wanted desperately to be seen as “good”. She couldn’t say, “I am struggling and I need help” so instead she made me feel like my emotions were the problem. She made me feel like I was making things up and/or that my emotions weren’t valid. If I was feeling sad and started crying, she would tell me “Stop that. You have nothing to cry about” or “you’re not really sad, you’re just doing that for attention. Be quiet.” If I was feeling confident and exuberant, she would tell me, “Who do you think you are? Sit down and be quiet.” If I expressed anger, it was, “You better shut your mouth right this instant. I’ll slap you silly.” It was like I couldn’t win; sad or angry or happy; it didn’t matter. I was too needy, too sensitive, too loud. I had too much energy. I was too quiet. I was making that up. I was a liar, I was a bad kid. Essentially the message was “Sit down, be quiet and act like you don’t exist.” This kind of abuse teaches your system it is not safe to feel, that it’s not safe to cry, or be angry, or joyous… it teaches you that your feelings are wrong, that you’re wrong, that’s it’s not safe to be yourself. It’s no wonder I wanted to be invisible as a kid, right? It took me years to learn how to let myself feel. Years. I went through a really long stage of letting things get to a point where I would just completely explode; saying and doing things I regretted. After many experiences of these kinds of regrets I just went into a serious addiction stage where it was all about suppression and denial and distraction. The exploding was healthier, I think. My journey in learning how to feel in a constructive way is an ongoing process.

In reality, my mother was the one who was lying. She would tell me she didn’t say the thing she said, didn’t do the thing she did, and didn’t feel the way she clearly felt. As I’ve mentioned, she certainly didn’t acknowledge how I felt. Her lies went from little, like lying about how much something cost, to bigger, like telling my dad we went to go see a movie that day when we didn’t, or telling people she read books to me every night when she didn’t. She would make up things like what my favorite book or movie was or whether or not I liked a certain kind of food. It was like I didn’t exist, like she was making up this entire story about who I was and what our life was like. My childhood was a confusing time, to say the least. I could sense that my mother was not the only liar in the family. It seemed like everyone was lying. It felt like living in this place where there was always a big, fat elephant in the room. It felt like living in a never-ending play where everyone was always acting. Nothing felt true. The way I coped with this strangeness was to ignore my own intuition and go along with the show. I was just a kid, that’s all I could really do.

“The fountainhead of all contempt, all discrimination, is the more or less conscious, uncontrolled, and covert exercise of power over the child by the adult. What adults do to their child’s spirit is entirely their own affair, for the child is regarded as the parent’s property in the same way the citizens of a totalitarian state are considered the property of its government. Until we become sensitized to the small child’s suffering, this wielding of power by adults will continue to be regarded as a normal aspect of the human condition, for hardly anyone pays attention or takes it seriously. Because the victims are “only children,” their distress is trivialized. But in twenty years, these children will be adults who will feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children.” — Alice Miller, The Drama of The Gifted Child

“A dysfunctional family is a product of a dysfunctional society. They go hand in hand. In a dysfunctional family there is a lot of intergenerational trauma so there’s a lot of skeletons in the closet, a lot of things being brushed under the rug. In a dysfunctional family there’s a rule: ‘we don’t talk about it.’” — Mary Toolen

Triangulation & The Golden Child-Scapegoat Family Dynamic

Wikipedia tells us, “In the Bible, a scapegoat is one of a pair of kid goats that is released into the wilderness, taking with it all sins and impurities, while the other is sacrificed. The concept first appears in the Book of Leviticus, in which a goat is designated to be cast into the desert to carry away the sins of the community.”

I like Merriam-Webster’s definition: “one that bears the blame for others; one that is the object of irrational hostility”

“It’s very common for Narcissistic Mothers to have a Golden Child and Scapegoat dynamic going on in their family.” — daughtersofnarcissiticmothers.com

“Within the dysfunctional family unit, the unhealthy, toxic, and often narcissistic caregiver splits their own good self-image and bad self-image into two distinct parts and then projects them onto their children. Consequently, one child becomes the all-good, or golden child, and the other becomes the all-bad, or scapegoat. Triangulation is the method used by narcissistically inclined individuals to soothe and protect their ego, in part because they lack whole object relations. This is the inability to see that most people have a mix of good and bad qualities and seeing things as black or white only. The golden child is idealized, and can seemingly do no wrong. The scapegoat, however, is devalued, and only does wrong. The children themselves are of no consequence, and their preferences, personalities, feelings, and indeed their humanity are ignored, especially if they are in disagreement with the parents projection.” — psychcentral.com

For reference regarding the “good” vs. “bad” parts, my sister, for example, was named after Melanie Hamilton, the character in Gone With The Wind. In case you’re unfamiliar, Melanie’s character is very demure and strait-laced; that’s the kind of woman my mother deemed “good.” I was like Scarlet — brazen and audacious. My sister was born nearly 6 years after me, and I feel like my mother named her after this specific character in an effort to call in the kind of daughter she really wanted. The opposite of me.

“For every golden child, there is also normally a scapegoat in the mix. This is the child who gets the brunt of the blame when bad things arise in a dysfunctional family. Essentially, the scapegoat’s role is to be the antithesis of the golden child. According to Psychology Today, this proverbial ‘black sheep’ “is part of a family’s collective, unconscious psychological projection process in which they essentially defer and outsource the pain, tension, and anxiety felt within their dysfunctional system onto one person who then psychologically, and sometimes physically, ‘holds’ the emotional energy of the family.” In other words, the scapegoated child is constantly put down by toxic parents for the mistakes of others. Unfortunately, feeling like the outcast of the family is another form of emotional abuse that can also have harmful impacts on a person’s self-esteem and mental state.” -familyeducation.com

“The Scapegoat can be punished for doing something well because that threatens the narcissist’s narrative that the Scapegoat is all bad. Not overtly punished, because that would also ruin the narrative that it’s all the Scapegoat’s fault. But subtly, sneakily. You had to give up dancing just as you reached a triumphant milestone because of [insert trumped-up excuse here] — maybe they supposedly couldn’t afford dance classes any longer, or the lift to the dance classes was no longer possible, or they fell out with the dance teacher. Bonus points if the reason for sabotaging the dance classes involved the Golden Child: “Golden Child wants to do dance too, and we can’t afford both, and it’s not fair for you to be the only one.” (And no matter if Golden Child does stuff that you don’t.) Or, “We can’t bring you to dance class anymore as Golden Child is taking up karate and her classes are on at that time.” Or the punishment might be more subtle. Perhaps your dog got given away, ostensibly for a totally unconnected reason, after you won the dance medal. When such things happen enough you’ll learn, consciously or unconsciously, the pattern that bad things happen after you do something good, and you’ll start to sabotage your own successes to protect yourself from that. (As an aside, be aware that such sabotage patterns will last a whole lifetime until and unless they are proactively erased. EFT/Tapping is excellent for identifying and erasing such patterns.)” — daughtersofnarcissiticmothers.com

My sister was The Golden Child and I, of course, was the Scapegoat. I could do no right. When I won third place in a city-wide art contest in the third grade it became an extremely stressful affair to take me to the parade and then it was never spoken about again; it was like it never happened. I remember one time my mother told me I would never be an artist like my friend Angela because I would never be able to draw like her. Of course, in front of other people she would sing a very different tune. She took me out of dance class. She gave away my dog without even telling me. When I asked her, “Where’s Daisy?” she responded by telling me, “I gave her to Ms. Massey (our neighbor)”. She moved me to a new school just when I started making friends. She tried to control who I was friends with and any time I became close with someone she didn’t like, she would try and get me not to like them or them not to like me. She was also crazy strict, making it hard for me to see my friends. She manipulated me into sabotaging my relationship with my first love. It took me a long time to peel through these layers because each time something like this happened she made me feel like it was my choice. She would tell me, “You didn’t like art camp. You wanted to quit dance. You didn’t take care of the dog.” Etc, etc. I don’t remember my mother ever having anything nice to say to me except for the “pretty” thing, but even when she would tell me how “pretty” I was, it felt like a backhanded compliment. She made me feel like that was all I had to offer, like that was the only reason I had friends. She told me the only reason my boyfriend liked me was because he wanted to have sex with me. Nothing I achieved was ever acknowledged. Nothing I did was ever good enough. And not only was I targeted by my own mother but my siblings and I were also pinned against each other. It was like every man for himself in our house. To this day my siblings and I are unable to have a relationship because of these unhealed family dynamics. It’s really sad. Years ago, my sister and I decided to go on a road trip in an effort to reconnect and during our time together she told me “Mom used to say things to me like she wanted me to hate you.” Heartbreakingly, our road trip only lasted about a week because our triggers were too much for either of us to handle gracefully at the time and we haven’t spoken since.

“We can only solve this riddle if we manage to see the parents, too, as insecure children- children who have at last found a weaker creature, in comparison with whom they can now feel very strong.” — Alice Miller, The Drama of The Gifted Child

So, here I was, the family problem. Connection is our deepest need as children, it is an absolute necessity and so I learned how to find connection through being the problem, through being someone who needed help. The truth is I was a bright, gifted child but I learned the only way to find connection was through betraying myself. Essentially my entire life was based on a false self-concept. To survive I had to gaslight myself. I had to see myself as inherently wrong, a bad egg, someone who needed help. Because the only way for me to fit into my family system was to be “the problem” and because I couldn’t seem to change that about myself I spent my life believing it was true and looking for other people who could “save me” and/or “make me better”. I internalized my parent’s cruelty. I developed an Inner Abuser, an Inner Gaslighter, an Inner Saboteur, a deep self-hatred and a way of connecting that involved me being a problem that needed to be fixed. My inner world was the equivalent of how the prison guards beat the crying dude on his first night in prison in The Shawshank Redemption. My parents were the guards, I was the crying dude. And then I took on the part of the guards, as well. So I became the guards and the crying dude. Super fun. Even worse, my Inner Gaslighter became my main protector identity because, like all of us, my greatest need in life is connection, and I believed that in order to gain connection, I needed to be the problem. The majority of my life has been spent gaslighting myself (betraying myself, same thing) because my cellular memory told me this was the only way for me to create connection and stay safe. Enter The Betrayal Bond (next essay).

You’d think you’d just be able to easily brush off these kinds of things, right? Like, ok, this happened, it sucked, but it’s over now and there’s nothing I can do about it. I know it wasn’t personal, I know it wasn’t really about me. I’ve been a fountain of tears for years. I scream and punch pillows. I paint. I do breath work and yoga and energy healing. But it hasn’t been enough… I keep trying to put it away and move on with my life but what I’ve been realizing is that there’s a part of me who really needs to be seen and heard, and I’ll never be able to move on until I say it and send it out into the world. I don’t even know who is going to read this but it doesn’t seem to matter. Just knowing that I’ve written it all down and it’s out there is enough. Writing has been one of my greatest healers. If you’re still reading this, I love you.

I SPENT THE FIRST PART OF MY LIFE FORCED TO BELIEVE THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME AND SUBSEQUENTLY FELL INTO NUMEROUS DAMAGING RELATIONSHIPS BECAUSE OF THAT BELIEF BUT HENCEFORTH, I DECLARE: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ME, DAMMIT.

Hallelujah, I am freed.