Why am I still everyones scapegoat

Insecure and selfish people tend to display little to no shame when attacking one’s weaknesses. This type of relating is a form of trauma bonding, which can be difficult to break away from since the chemicals in our brains that produce attachment formation and separation anxiety can be addictive.

There isn’t a lot of information to go off from, but what you are expressing sounds familiar, and I will take this opportunity to speak from my own experience, in the hopes that you will be able to gain insights that are relevant to you. Also, I am not a certified mental health professional.

Due to my codependent nature, when I was growing up I would be a people pleaser. Being seen as a nice guy was something that I took pride in. Whenever someone blamed me for something, I would just accept their projections without hesitation, and bend over backward to help them fix the issue, which a lot of the time, it was their own self-undoing.

This was exhausting because I wasn’t getting the same help in return when I needed it. I felt like I was being taken for granted and my identity was engulfed by other people’s lives. Without having my own mission, purpose, and sense of self-identity, I was lost without their approval.

I learned that I viewed my niceness as a way of making myself seem important and valuable to them, but really it was my codependent way of trying to control that person and leverage guilt to manipulate them when they would blame me. It was a vicious cycle.

The way I was able to recover was by distancing myself from the toxic people in my life and spending more time with people who appreciated me. This gave me more time to do shadow work (codependency, narcissism, dysfunctional families and relationships, shame, judgment, abuse, anxiety, attachment issues, etc.) that strengthened the relationship with myself. Integrating the disowned parts of one’s personality is the most effective way to develop authenticity, self-compassion, and confidence.

For those moments where I couldn’t distance myself from that person, I would journal the experience. I use OneNote, but Evernote is free and just as good. I use it daily and one of the best features is linking external information with journal entries, which accelerated my personal development.

This technique helped because I was able to leave everything on the page and move on. It made me and the other person accountable for our actions, and over time, I would start seeing patterns in their behavior. When you are able to put a label on someone’s behavior, they become incrementally more predictable to you. This increased my emotional intelligence and over time I learned how to make the conscious decision to stop falling victim to other people’s emotional vampirism.

Feel free to let me know if you would like additional resources to anything I mentioned above. I can point you in the right direction, save you a lot of time, and speed up your development and recovery.

‘I will take care of me for you, if you will take care of you for me.’ – Jim Rohn