What is a Scapegoat?

To put it plainly: a person blamed for the wrongdoings, mistakes, or faults of others. What does that mean exactly?

It means that if you are someone’s scapegoat, you are going to be the reason someone else did or said something, or the reason something happened, or more broadly YOU are the problem.

The scapegoat is given a tremendous amount of power, but ends up feeling weak, shameful, pitiable, guilty, or that they are evil, bad, or wrong. In come cases, wrongness becomes inseparable from the way they see themselves: they can mistake what others say for their true identities.

In families, the scapegoat tends to be the person the family collectively identifies as a source of their dysfunctional behavior. The idea being that if the person to blame for familial disruption is somehow fixed, then the family will be fixed.