World Mental Health Day and Family Scapegoating Abuse (FSA) Awareness
Let's raise awareness about the reality of Family Scapegoating Abuse (FSA) and its devastating impact on child victims and adult survivors...
World Mental Health Day: Raising Awareness About Family Scapegoating Abuse (FSA)
Today, on World Mental Health Day, I’d like to invite you all to take a moment to reflect on the importance of mental well-being and the various factors that can impact it. One of those factors is being exposed to family dysfunction and abuse.
This is a public post. Your comments will also be public and visible to everyone.
One often-overlooked issue is Family Scapegoating Abuse (FSA), a form of emotional and psychological abuse that can be individual as well as systemic and can have devastating effects on individuals and their mental and emotional well-being.
Here on the Family Scapegoating Abuse Education Substack, subscribers and visitors have an opportunity to raise awareness about the reality of FSA by sharing my public posts on their social media, with their health providers (including therapists), and others who may be open to hearing more about my research on this dysfunctional family system phenomenon. To educate other Substack users, they can also ‘restack’ my public posts. To those of you who have been sharing my posts as well as my introductory book on FSA, Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed, I sincerely thank you.
Understanding Family Scapegoating Abuse (FSA)
Scapegoating constitutes a cycle of blame that often goes unrecognized, perpetuating pain within our various social systems. Scapegoating in families occurs when one family member is assigned the blame for family dysfunction and conflict, putting them in the ‘family scapegoat’ or ‘Identified Patient’ (IP) role (the IP term is a term established decades ago within the field of Family Systems and points to the pathology of the family system, not the scapegoat target).
Scapegoating abuse is common to families with unacknowledged, unaddressed, and unprocessed intergenerational trauma, and can lead to chronic emotional distress, low self-esteem, and a range of mental health issues (including anxiety, depression and complex trauma) in child victims and adult survivors. This form of abuse occurs frequently in narcissistic family systems as well.
Why Raising Awareness About FSA Matters
Many individuals who are targets of FSA may feel isolated in their painful and confusing experiences, believing their struggles are unique or that they are somehow at fault in regard to how their family treats them.
By raising awareness, we can help break the stigma, encouraging survivors of FSA to share their experiences and seek support. Awareness leads to clarity and understanding, which in turn decreases survivors’ sense of isolation and fosters healing.
I’ve been on a mission to raise global awareness regarding family scapegoating abuse for over 15 years. It’s been at times a long, tiring, and frustrating journey, but at last FSA is beginning to be recognized within clinical and academic settings worldwide. For example, a peer-reviewed FSA study based on my original research and questionnaires is currently being conducted at a University in Zambia - you can read more about my efforts to publicize FSA internationally in my article Why Family Scapegoating Abuse Merits Global Attention.
Ways You Can Help Raise Awareness About FSA
1. Share Personal Stories: If you feel comfortable, share your experiences about FSA with other community members in our paywall-protected Chat space via our various paid subscriber features. Personal narratives can resonate deeply and help others feel less alone.
2. Utilize Social Media: Consider using social media to share my public posts about family scapegoating abuse as a means of promoting mental health awareness. Hashtags like #believescapegoatsurvivors, #scapegoatingisabuse, and #fsahealing (which I created and am now using in my posts) can help spread the message to others.
3. Advocate for Mental Health Resources: Contact your local representatives and urge them to advocate for better access to mental health services in your community, especially for those affected by dysfunctional and abusive family dynamics. You can also get in touch with local Mental Health organizations and share my resource list for FSA survivors.
4. Promote Literature and Resources: Share books, articles, and videos that address family scapegoating and its effects (which includes complex trauma, betrayal trauma, and toxic shame). Knowledge is power, and providing resources can help educate those who may not be familiar with the issue. You can find may books recommended by our community in this public discussion thread we recently had. You can also share my YouTube channel (where I serve as a licensed YouTube Health Partner), Beyond Family Scapegoating Abuse.
5. Share my Public Service Announcement on Family Scapegoating Abuse: This is a short video (just over 3 minutes) that can help raise awareness about the pain of FSA.
6. Engage in Active Listening: Sometimes, the best support is simply being there for someone. If another survivor of family abuse shares their struggles with you, listen without judgment and validate their feelings.
On this World Mental Health Day, let’s commit to raising awareness about Family Scapegoating Abuse. By fostering understanding and compassion within our communities, we can support those who have been affected and work towards healing and recovery.
Together, we can work toward raising public awareness regarding the reality that scapegoating is a form of systemic psycho-emotional abuse that negatively impacts the mental health of child victims and adult survivors.
Let’s break the cycle and advocate for a future where survivors of family scapegoating abuse feel seen, heard, and valued. The time has come for us to be able to speak freely about our abusive experiences with family and receive the same support and care that all survivors of abuse are rightfully entitled to.
I do not share any sort of enthusiasm about the so-called "Mental Health" industry...
They were only too happy to drug me up (still dealing with autonomic damages 10 years later) & blamed my brain for my abuse.
Thank you for your work on FSA!