P5:The Goat

This is a quick explanation of what was going on beneath the surface with my family and then Danielle.  One reason nothing could be fixed is that it would require everyone to acknowledge a family system of dysfunction existed, and their role in it.  It would require everyone to own what they had done and take responsibility for it.  I did.  They didn't.  This summary comes from a "Family Systems Theory" perspective — a theory introduced by Murray Bowen, MD in the mid-20th-century:  It proposes the family is an emotional unit and  system.  Alcoholic families are often identified by how well they fit the model.  Growing up, mine fit perfectly.

This family system always has a proverbial “Black Sheep”, otherwise known as the “identified patient” or scapegoat.  In my family, this was me.  Since no one talks about or acknowledges the alcoholic, or alcoholism, all of the family dysfunction, and all of the problems, are attributed to the scapegoat.  No one else is mentioned as a contributor to the family illness.  Just the scapegoat.

Ironically, the identified patient or acting out child is usually the one who knows there's something terribly wrong in the family.  The 'acting out' behaviors are actually an effort to bring attention to the family in the hope that someone will see what's wrong, and step into help.  No one ever did so I was who they blamed.  Not the drunk guy who keeps losing jobs because he sleeps until noon everyday, and neglects to pay the utility bill so our lights get turned off. Not the guy who only has one mood: rage.  Not him.

I was the problem.  They made me get brain scans at Stanford when I was ten so they could prove I was abnormal.  When that failed I was taken to a psychiatrist who kept insisting we have a pillow fight.  I refused to see him. Finally, after my seventh grade school year had ended, my parents sat us all down and announced we were moving to Santa Cruz.  We were moving there, they said, because of me and my delinquent behavior.  This was the message my siblings were given, and they believe it to this day.  They think of me as the problem because my parents told them I was.  I wasn't.  The guy drinking our money and getting arrested all the time was the problem.  The asshole we called 'Dad', even though he never acted like one.

This shit continued until I left for college.  If there was a crisis and my mom needed help she got me, not her husband.  When Susie tried to kill herself mom pulled me out of Jim Bunner's party to go with her to the hospital.  When Susie needed a 'Dad' to escort her at the halftime homecoming ceremony she used me while the real one watched from the stands.  I was in my teens but never allowed to act like a teenager.  They took my childhood to insure their lives flowed smoothly, then told me I was a lost cause when my own life derailed.  They didn't love me, they used me.  I let them because I was desperate to be loved.  The day I broke that agreement, one day after I was arrested, They abandoned me.  I was no longer useful to them so they probably shamed me and left me utterly alone.  I have never done anything they haven't done, including being arrested.  They left because I refused to be saddled with their shit anymore.  I refused to carry their projections.

My siblings did this.  My parents did it.  Danielle did it worst of all.  When I went into her house she knew it was over, and she'd be exposed.  She scapegoated me instead.  My drug use, and my family's belief that I was the Perpetual problem allowed her to stick anything on me.  She said I was having affairs when she was doing it.  I was being abusive despite my desperate drug use to escape the emotional abuse she had subjected me to for years.  Everyone was so use to thinking I was always the problem they simply discarded me like trash.  No one paused to see the pain I was in.  no one cared if I survived.  No one felt remorse about leaving me alone in the world without family, or friends.  No one cared that I had done nothing so egregious to deserve what they had done.  I never got over this shit because I never got to go beyond it.

The system is as common and predictable as it is because when the alcoholic system is in operation it works.  Unfortunately, unless serious counseling is done by each individual in the system the dysfunction will continue even after the alcoholic family has broken up.  Not only did this occur with my family, new members were assimilated in from families with similar dysfunctions.  The system was strengthened, not weakened.  Some examples:

• Danielle came from a family where no one talked about the obvious issues like Tim's control issues, serial affairs, and bathing with his daughters until they were fourteen.  Or Charlotte's acceptance of Tim's behavior, and her inability to communicate.  She didn't tell Danielle she loved her until she was an adult, sometime after we started dating.  Never before.
• Darren's dad sexually abused his sisters and his mom new it was going on.  She said and did nothing.  The dad wasn't allowed to be around his grand kids and years went by where he wasn't spoken to.  Don't know what, if anything, was done to Darren.  Just know he was estranged from his father for years.
• My Aunt Donna had serious psychological issues with her mother that persisted well into the time I knew her.  She was also a huge cocaine addict with my Uncle Mike for most of their early marriage years.  They would get cocaine and do it with me (without me asking) during visits with them when I was at San Diego State.  My Uncle Mike was a womanizer for the first ten years of their marriage, and contracted the HIV AIDS virus during one of his affairs.
• Kevin idealized my father and wouldn't acknowledge his failings.  Instead, he transferred his anger and disappointment at my dad on to me, the scapegoat.  Much easier and less painful to direct those things at a brother, than a father.  He told me he was 'disappointed' with my reaction to his graduation from Stanford (I cried and gave him a standing ovation), for one example.  I was his brother, not his Dad.  I wasn't obligated to provide anything.  Not the way one might feel their Father is. Unfair and misguided, to say the least.  He also quit a couple relationships with a couple of solid women just before he met Beth.  He asked Beth to marry him after a year of her very publicly accusing him of having affairs and stalking him when he went out without her.  She would literally follow him to parties and wait in her car all night to see if he left with anyone.  That's what he chose and if you try to talk with him about it he would shut you down.  Can't be healthy.

This is why my family dysfunction continued long after my family had ended. Each one of us chose partners with serious dysfunction themselves (seriously, who else would have married us).  They simply took someone else's place and the dysfunction continued.  It didn't matter that my sister was sober for decades, or that my Aunt became a drug counselor.  Neither one of them stepped out of or left their dysfunctional family system.  They still play their role despite their sobriety which means they were still dysfunctional.  

No one left the system until I did after my arrest.  I identified my role and took responsibility for it.  My role was playing the scapegoat, and I unconsciously consented to the way they treated me.  I gave them permission.  That's why, when I revoked that permission and refused to come back unless things changed, they cut me off, and continue to project their issues on me.  The only way to genuinely heal things required them to take responsibility for all of the s*** that they had done to me.  Two counselors told me they never would because it would require them to do the same work that I was doing, and it was unlikely they would do so.  Mike was the only one.

Instead of working on themselves they continued to blamed me and did everything they could to bring me back into the system.  That's why Danielle did everything she could to break me.  She took control of my things my house and my money thinking I'd have to come back without them.  She turned my family and friends against me thinking I would have to come back without them.  She never anticipated me taking the time to get well, or to do the difficult work I did to understand my family's dysfunction.  They stuck together and agreed to keep the dysfunction in place.  I left and saved my life.  All I had to do to be accepted back in was to accept all the blame the way I had always done.  All I had to do was forgive their transgressions the way I had always done.  I didn't.  I chose my solitary life instead.

     The identified patient is part of a family’s collective, unconscious psychological projection process where they essentially defer and outsource the pain, tension, and anxiety felt within the dysfunctional family system onto one person who then psychologically and sometimes physically “holds” the emotional energy of the family, manifesting it in symptoms and behaviors that the other members of the group can point to and say, “There’s the problem! It’s him, not us!”

     In this way, the identified patient is the so-called family scapegoat, the proverbial “Black Sheep,” serving as a “protective function” for the family’s larger dysfunction."

There is no gray area here. It's black and white.  When the truth is told we're not special or unique.  Our family and the members of it fit this Paradigm perfectly.  All alcoholic families do.

I'm not the problem.  I'm not the issue.  I'm not the mess they make me out to be.  I'm the scapegoat because of my character and personality traits.  I'm the strongest of the bunch.  I'm the most honest, the most decent.  I'm the most compassionate.  The scapegoat always is. That's why they are chosen.  there was nothing accidental about my family placing me in the middle.  I was the only one who could survive it.  They knew that.  They still do.