How Scapegoats Can Heal from Narcissistic Abuse

3 Steps Towards Compassion, Protection & Freedom

De: Jay Reid

Narrado por: Antoni La Vecchia

Are you afraid to feel good? Do you see everyone else pursuing their right to happiness yet feel held back? Do you feel alone, strange or that there’s something wrong with you. Here’s the good news: None of these feelings are true!

This is how people feel after a childhood as the scapegoat to a narcissistic parent. These parents require this child to feel bad so that they don’t have to. Scapegoat children learn it is psychologically dangerous to feel good about who they are.

This book lays out three steps to finally make it safe to feel good about yourself. First, you will find compassion for yourself by making sense of what happened. Second, you will protect yourself by moving away from narcissistic abusers and toward safe people. Third, you will discover freedom by defying the rules of your narcissistic parent. Most importantly, you will learn how to overcome obstacles and put these steps into action.

The author, Jay Reid, is a practicing psychotherapist who specializes in helping adult scapegoat survivors recover from narcissistic abuse. His first book, “Growing Up as the Scapegoat Child: A Guide to Healing”, helped thousands understand and address the lasting effects of such abuse.

©2024 Jay Reid (P)2024 Jay Reid

Still more validating strategies and insights

If you’re familiar with Jay Reid, you know he helps scapegoats feel seen and understood like no one else out there. I’ve recommended his first book to so many.

This book brings what I was hoping for after finishing Reid’s first book: more detailed strategy, examples, and insights for healing. If you want to take a look at the contents, a reviewer has kindly screenshotted them on amazon since the look inside feature appears to be unavailable at the moment.

You’ll see each section is short but profound, with the right amount of information to take things slowly and go at your own pace.

I’m very grateful that Reid brought up creativity in this book. Damaged creative impulses are so common in scapegoats. Finding a way back to feeling worthy and joyful in creative self expression is profoundly healing. If you were insulted, treated with contempt, or even just ignored when you created, it is possible to regain some of the spontaneous self expression. For me it takes daily work and always will, but it is the focus of my existence.

Reid also talks about that time when it will no longer serve you to eat, sleep, and research narcissism. Perpetually dwelling in that realm keeps your abuser front and center when you need to learn to put your healing first. You’ll know when the time has come for this, and then the strategies Reid offers will be so valuable. I suspect most pop psych online grifters who live by our clicks have zero interest in our getting well. By contrast, Reid knows the deep research phase is just that, not meant to be a way of life.

My only complaint, and it’s really more of a disagreement, is about the insistence that scapegoated children live out some kind of helplessness. Some of us were not allowed to show one trace of need or weakness. The idea that we got anything we wanted from acting out incompetence, weakness, or helpless ruses is misleading, if unintentionally so. If you were the all bad child, you know these behaviors often led to more severe abuse, not assitance.

For example, in one section, Reid mentions being treated well when sick. His point clearly is to encourage us not to believe we can only be treated well if somehow we are perceived as weaker, inferior creatures to the narcissists, thereby propping up their sense of superiority. That may be true for some, but often scapegoats are treated like garbage when we are sick. Anyone who’s scrolled through the reddit sub about narcissistic parents is aware of this.

I would like to have seen more nuance overall. Some of us who were subjected to constant fake suicide threats to manipulate us whenever we needed help or were one upped by trivial narcissistic whining when we were seriously ill did not have the luxury of feigning helplessness.

Many of us have CPTSD from the abuse we received when we needed medical help. Some of us even now refuse medical care until matters become dire because of it.

The balance between vulnerability and invincibility is be hard for scapegoats to find, and implying we as a group act out helplessness in exchange for better care is misleading. I’d like to see Reid expand his outlook about this somewhat inaccurate view in future.

Overall, narration and sound editing are not up to the standards of the highly professional production of Reid’s first book.

There are many grammatical clangers and recording mistakes that were not edited out. Was the script a rough draft full of errors? I wonder since there are so many instances of subject-verb disagreement and apparent misspelling. If the script were in error, it should have been corrected before giving it to the voice actor. The actor mispronounces many words in basic English as well, which can hardly be blamed on the script.

I’d have chosen the print version if I had known this, and wouldn’t have wasted a credit on a recording that greatly detracted from the material.