DEFINING SCAPEGOATING
Scapegoating is a hostile social - psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group. It is also a practice by which angry feelings and feelings of hostility may be projected, via inappropriate accusation, towards others. The target feels wrongly persecuted and receives misplaced vilification, blame and criticism; he is likely to suffer rejection from those who the perpetrator seeks to influence. Scapegoating has a wide range of focus: from "approved" enemies of very large groups of people down to the scapegoating of individuals by other individuals. Distortion is always a feature.

FOR SCAPEGOAT TARGETS
First of all build an understanding of what has been going on, not just on the surface, but deeper as well. What is your scapegoater really trying to achieve?

From me:
As I didn’t come here just to complain and have my head patted perfunctorily, but to understand how to perhaps fix the problems in my family, I have often asked questions of posters that have been taken as me attacking them as if you were here for that reason too. If you will look at that last paragraph about building a deeper understanding and not just a surface one, you should see that I was trying to do what this board was set up to do. That no one wants to understand the big picture of their issues with being blamed by their family, don’t want to even consider taking any blame at all for what has transpired to ruin a family, is obvious and guess what? ..it makes you part of the problem automatically.

So you guys can go on believing you are being attacked when I ask questions you don’t want to think about the answer to, but if you are not strong enough to participate in some introspection don’t blame that on me and say I ruined everything just because I opened that necessary door. And perhaps this is not the place for you anyway if you only want to be right all the time.

I believe understanding about scapegoating is only the very start of recovery. Having realised I have been scapegoated by my family, and having let it sink in, I an now tackling the next stage of my recovery which is learning what effect it has had on my personality, if we are all honest, it has no doubt affected most of us.

Being scapegoated made me feel ashamed just for being me, made me paranoid, made me try to only say what I think people want me to say, made me keep emotions bottled up.