1. 

   Erin

   March 8, 2024

   Is there a forum to share and discuss personal experiences with scapegoating in detail?

   Reply
   1. 

      Rebecca C. Mandeville, MA

      March 9, 2024

      I don’t run any groups or forums, but my YouTube community has a lot of discussions going on. I also refer people to Rhonda’s private Facebook group. Both links can be accessed here: https://www.scapegoatrecovery.com/updated-fsa-recovery-resources-2023/

      Reply
2. 

   Jo

   December 10, 2023

   Once again Doctor M gets into the meat of the subject. Radical acceptance is a very easy concept that comes with a tremendous amount of pain and loss. Loss of hope and loss of all the things that should have been but weren’t. Radical acceptance leaves me holding the bag all by myself and for me I was left an emotional amputee. Finding out about FSA so late in my life left me fighting for my sanity and everyday is a struggle. It’s a twisted knot of self doubt not knowing who I am at all. See i never saw there behavior as any type of abuse because it started so young and ended so very late for me. My daughter said how could you not know what they were doing was abuse. I said it was all I knew. The concept of gray rocking after many yrs of no contact is all I see in the future for my family and myself. My daughter is getting married in six months and the whole tribe will be there and it scares me to even face them. None of my siblings ever cared what I had to say or how I felt. They shamed me into silence every time I tried. There is no more trying and the fantasies of what and how I want to explain my innocence to my family is finally slowly dying. What’s the point!

   Reply
3. 

   Ge

   November 22, 2023

   How do you accept your whole family is gone? Your brothers, sisters, nieces and nefews, uncles and aunts and all their surrounding partners and friends? How do you accept their smear-campains towards your friends and wider social circle? How they managed to isolate you with lies and wicked talk just to disarm you behind your back?
   How to accept the truth of this tremendous betrayal?
   And how to start all over again?

   I’m going over it almost every day. Trying to remember almost day by day over years what happened and why. Putting things in a story/timeline that fits facts.
   Where did I go wrong? Where did they go wrong? It’s just so hard.
   I know I tried everything in my way to solve the problems with them. But while trying they only got worse with them.

   I had to give up, but it’s such a loss. I’ve tried so hard (in hindsight) to be a good son, brother, friend. I did all my best to support them anyway I could. I payed thousends of dollars on them to save them from further harm (and my mother from bankrupcy). Motivated them to get good education which mostly succeeded.

   Still I’m this awfull, bad scapegoat in their eyes.
   I can accept people leaving me for many different honest reasons of their own. But not on false accusations and smearing. I’ll never accept this.
   I know I have to go on without them and it’s very hard and lonely.
   I know I have to accept this. But the way foreward is very difficult to see once you see radical exeptance is all you can do.

   Reply
4. 

   Christie O

   November 8, 2023

   Your article is a good reminder of the wisdom of not fighting reality, no matter how painful it was and is. A part of me spoke up as I finished reading to say that it can be hard to accept what you don’t fully know. So I suppose radical acceptance is a process. You accept what you know at the present time, and commit to remaining open to accepting more as you remember and learn more. This takes a lot of courage and willingness to love parts of yourself that, heretofore, you have not loved, because your parents didn’t.

   Reply
   1. 

      Rebecca C. Mandeville, MA

      November 9, 2023

      Wise words, and well said. Thank you for pointing out that cultivating an attitude of radical acceptance is a process – Very true!

      Reply
5. 

   Rosalee

   November 7, 2023

   I very much appreciate your book and ongoing work and knowledge to help people deal with Family Scapegoat abuse. I accepted my elder sisters are who they are, and will never change and I’ve had no contact with them since 2010. However they were able to inflict such lasting damage in 2010 it continues to create new and compounding traumas and harm. They decided to carry out a smear campaign against me while I was in the midst of grueling cancer treatments. They did this by phoning medical doctors I was seeing during cancer treatment to make up lies about my mental health and my character. Unbeknownst to me 4 psych labels based on their lies plus the lies themselves, were published onto my electronic medical records as factual. When I later obtained my medical records and discovered the lies and labels I tried many times without success to get my records corrected. I then ended up suing my eldest sister for defamation. She finally issued a legal retraction (that was carefully worded to protect herself). I submitted the retraction along with letters from my family doctor and 3 other mental health professionals who all disputed the psych labels but to this day I cannot get the system or the doctor to amend my records. This false, damaging info on my records has resulted in every health care provider I have interacted with since 2010 (except for my family doctor) treating me in a cruel and very dehumanizing manner and to be repeatedly denied much needed health care services even for treatments my family doctor referred me for. As a result my physical health keeps declining and I live with more debilitating pain from being denied services due to the lies and psych labels. Not sure what else I can do at this point but having the information and validation of FSA has been very helpful.

   Reply
   1. 

      Rebecca C. Mandeville, MA

      November 9, 2023

      Thank you for taking the time to share your painful FSA experiences with us. I do hope you are now cancer free. Your position is a very difficult one. I’m glad you are finding my work here helpful, and in case you missed it, here is a link to updated resources for FSA adult survivors that I put together. You might find Rhonda’s private Facebook group helpful (link is included): https://www.scapegoatrecovery.com/updated-fsa-recovery-resources-2023/

      Reply
      1. 

         Rosalee

         November 12, 2023

         Thank you so much!

         Reply
6. 

   Elizabeth

   November 5, 2023

   Yes, we carry ourselves forward and away from the cruelty and the lies that were waged to stop us. They tried and failed to destroy us. Let them reap their reward of nothingness because it’s well earned.

   Each step we take away from the past and boldly into the future as survivors of mistreatment is proof of the profound victory of Truth.

   Reply
   1. 

      Rebecca C. Mandeville, MA

      November 5, 2023

      Well said, Elizabeth, thank you.

      Reply
7. 

   btj

   November 5, 2023

   this is an excellent article. I can never forgive my family, and what they have done is not over. That is the hard thing to accept. it comes as no shock to me that they did it. But it has been going on for 9 years. None of what they did is in the past. They have continued their destruction of my life into my professional life. They teamed up with a former employer and stole a lot of money from me, denied me my rights to my mother’s estate. The attorney for the employer and my sister has shown up in my affairs over and over. The guy doesn’t go away. They are on a revenge rampage because I keep catching them. One sister and a co-worker tipped me off about it all. Now they have written me off as crazy and I think they likely did something legally with regard to it. A psychologist looked into the matter for me and said to “get a lawyer”. However, I can’t get a lawyer. Nobody in this city is going to help me because of all the illegal and unethical actions that were taken to do what they did to me. So, I continue to live with people who with no consent or authority handle my affairs and I have given no permission for any person or organization to ever do so. So, they are gone from my life but still continue to destroy me every second, minute and hour of every day. I am in a postion where I cannot move forward in my life until it’s fixed.

   Reply
   1. 

      Rebecca C. Mandeville, MA

      November 5, 2023

      Your comment provides a living example of why radical acceptance need not mean we are being submissive or passive. You are fighting to change what you can – and I wish you success with it.

      Reply
8. 

   J.V. M

   November 5, 2023

   I really like what Stephanie Dowrick says about forgiveness. She says Forgiveness is about ceasing to feel bitterness towards a person, ceasing to wish for bad things to happen to them. It is letting go of that, clearing yourself of the harm such mindset causes you. It is not about forgetting what they did, or even accommodating them in any way. You may choose never to see this person again, never to contact them again, and to avoid them if they are anywhere near you, if that is what you need to be safe, to be comfortable, to hold to the limits you need for yourself. And you don’t need to communicate with them at all about having let go of that, clearing them out of your mind and heart and soul if you have chosen to do so.
   And when I studied DBT, I was taught that Radical Acceptance is about choosing to stop the suffering you experience when you fight accepting reality as it is. It is saying things are not as they should be, they are not what you deserve, but they are what they are. For example, I may choose to visit my mean, narcissistic mother in her aged care home once a week because I feel strongly that it is important to give her that contact as a good daughter, even though she says savage things that make me cry when I see her. If I choose Radical Acceptance to manage the suffering the situation causes me, it means accepting that I am making this choice, accepting that when I see her my mother will say cruel things, and then I must consider whether meeting my own standards matters enough to me, I can let go of the suffering I feel when as always she says cruel things. And if the satisfaction and self-pride that gives me is important enough, I then will be able to stop letting it get to me. Alternatively, I could choose not to see her and to Radically Accept that I am not measuring up to my own standards of what a good daughter does, but to say that being staunch to myself and keeping myself from such treatment is the more important thing and to be happy with that decision, and accept the reality of that situation.

   Reply
   1. 

      Rebecca C. Mandeville, MA

      November 5, 2023

      Wonderful addition to the article, thank you. And – a deeper discussion of forgiveness could be an article on this blog in and of itself; I’ll address Stephanie’s concepts on forgiveness (and that of others) in future.

      Reply

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