The following is an excerpt from my book on FSA, Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed: Help and Hope for Adults in the Family Scapegoat Role. While repressing core parts of ourselves…
Many people are familiar with Kubler-Ross’s ‘Five Stages of Grief’, which are Denial; Anger; Bargaining; Depression; Acceptance. In my model for family scapegoating abuse (FSA) recovery (which I will expand upon in an upcoming book), I use the term ‘radical acceptance’ versus ‘acceptance’ to describe a late-stage healing concept that is critical to the FSA adult survivor’s full recovery from systemic family abuse.
[Note: This article originally written for The C-PTSD Foundation in November 2020] Complex PTSD ( which is sometimes interchanged with terms such as complex relational trauma, developmental trauma, and interpersonal…