Self sacrifice : on loss of the authentic Self as psychological survival strategy : Eight scenarios!

The Catholic education I was raised within seemed often to promote self sacrifice as a value and by all means if someone is struggling in some way and we can help then that is good, but to me it’s not the kind of Self sacrifice you learn to undergo if you were raised by caregivers who didn’t really see you or validate your true self and led you to believe that certain attributes you have which could serve you well, such as asserting yourself, your right to be and maintaining healthy boundaries, expressing anger, differences or alternative desires to theirs were not acceptable

Loss of connection to ourselves and our legitimate, genuine feelings, rights, needs and desires comes at an enormous cost to many of us who may have been raised to think expressing these things is ‘selfish’.   According to Andrea Mathews :

identity is a survival strategy that we assume very early in life in response to the projections of primary caregivers.  Scapegoating the good-guy child is one of the primary methods of projection by which the child’s early identification process is shaped.  By scapegoating, what we mean first is that the child must sacrifice something.  With regard to identity this means that the child sacrifices Self for an identity that world to support the family trance * Second, the child is being required to take on shadow material for others.   Shadow material is usually unconscious material.  In the case of the good guy identity, what is generally projected is dark stuff, stuff that other family members don’t want to own, emotions they don’t want to have to deal with, and responsibilities that they don’t want to have to take care of. ….. There are several possible scenarios  of parental projection that can scapegoat a child…….

The first of these is the case in which the child is unwanted and is therefore ignored – as in emotionally abandoned.  The child is not noticed at all, until and unless the child acts so outrageously (which is usually only some mild form of misbehavior or some urgent need such as illness) that the parent has to get involved either to punish the child or save face in front of the parent’s peers.  This child is never surprised at the punishment, for he has introjected the belief that he deserves it.  The child has somehow betrayed the parent by being born – therefore punishment is a natural outcome of being alive.  In order to avoid punishment and still somehow stay at least marginally connected to his family, he must become invisible.  His main challenge is to learn to be invisible.  This child will grow up believing that the worst thing he can do is show up.

The second case scenario is the one in which the parent demonstrates an almost incestuous closeness with the child’s identity, all the while starving the authentic Self in the child of anything that would encourage it to be and grow.  This child is often emotionally disabled by the closeness to the parent, for the parent’s projected need for the child’s closeness has taken over every aspect of the child’s consciousness. The child then has no access to her own emotions.  As an adult who is becoming more conscious, she may look back and wonder how she was able to miss so much of what really was going on between parent and child.  The child suffers the illusion that she is very close to the parent and demonstrates this by literally staying physically close to the parent, desiring only to please the parent.  Under it all she senses that to displease the parent is to lose the parent.  At certain points this child, as an adult, may become aware that she feels smothered by the parent, but the minute she starts thinking that, she simultaneously develops a primal fear that to become conscious of that means death. What this child is really carrying is all of the parent’s old unresolved needs for belonging so that the parent never has to become aware of them.  In this kind of system we often see a long generational history of exactly this kind of enmeshment, projection, and introjection.

In the third case scenario the parent needs the child to think, walk, act, talk, and feel just like the parent. The parent wants a mini-me.  The brainwashing that covertly takes place here consists of two steps: (1) the child is noticed, as in given eye contact and some form of mild approval, for following the parental agenda, and (2) the parent either shows no consciousness whatsoever of the child’s authenticity, or that authenticity is outright rejected or punished.  If the child actually accepts the mini-me identity, the parent and child will be enmeshed.  They will call it closeness, but actually the child has had to give up his authenticity for this so called closeness – so the authentic child is never really known at all.  In the case where the child is actually so different from the parent as to not be able to accommodate the parent’s wishes for a mini me, the child may grow up feeling as if he is guilty bad, and shameful because he has not been what his parent wanted him to be.  At best this relationship will be a push pull dynamic where the parent is always trying to get the child to change and the child will feel guilty at times and try to comply but subtly or overtly rebel at other times. Either way he will carry a deep seated shame and will not likely know why.

In the fourth case scenario the child is literally blamed for all of the parent’s mistakes.  This child is told that when the parent has a temper tantrum or makes other poor decisions, it is the child’s fault, as in:  “If you hadn’t done………………, I wouldn’t have had to ……………….”… She may either feel tremendous guilt and responsiblity, or she will feel a deep seated shame that will either manifest in devastatingly poor self esteem or the need to outright rebel against the parent.  If the rebellion doesn’t become yet another identity, (which would be a bad guy identity or something very different from the good guy identity), it can be the healthier of the these two options.

In the fifth case scenario the child is made to feel responsible for the parent’s emotional, psychological, or physical wellbeing.  Perhaps one or both of the parents are sick or addicted to substances.  There could also be a scenario in which the parents cannot or will not play an appropriate parent role, so the child feels like he must fix them or take care of the family.  Or the child may be left in charge of house cleaning, cooking, babysitting, etc., on a daily basis for such a length of time that being the responsible one becomes an identity.  This child will be empowered with superhero capacities to do things that a normal child would not even know how to do, and so there will be some affirming identification with this superhero theme.  But there may also be an underlying guilt that says that IF he doesn’t do the things that parents seem to need them to do THEN the whole world will fall apart and it will be all his fault. He grows up thinking this way about all kinds of life scenarios, and he gets involved only with people who need him take care of them.

In the sixth case scenario the child is raised by parents who believe very strongly in right and wrong, good and bad.  They appear in every way to be good parents to the child who is attended to, disciplined, and loved.  But one or both of the parents have a secret.  Perhaps they are actually frequently, but privately quarrelling, so there is coldness in the air quiet often.  Perhaps one or both of them is having an affair.  Perhaps there is some kind of financial secret, or one of them is involved in something that is ethically questionable.  The child grows up consciously feeling that she’s had a good childhood and even lucky to have good parents.  But ona subliminal level the child is picking up on the tension around the secret.  As children often do this child picks up the fact that something is wrong but instead of thinking something is wrong with the parents, she believes that it must be her.  She must correct the wrong in order to make that dark feeling go away.  Since the tension around the secret lingers over a long period of time, this response becomes habitual to the point that the child begins to believe that dark feeling is her – that something is wrong with her.  Therefore, she begins to strive to be very good, even perfect, in order to make this dark feeling go away.  In this way the child slowly learns to take ownership of other people’s stuff in order to be good enough to fix it.

The seventh scenario is one in which, as above, the parents believe very strongly in right and wrong.  In this case, however, their need to create a totally morally correct family life will impact the child, sometimes severely.  The parents in this case are so morally correct that they forget the sensitivities and needs for belonging, which are primal to the budding consciousness of the child.  The child is berated and punished for the slightest infractions.  An innately sensitive child will commonly strive to be very good, so that he wont get into trouble with the morally correct parents.  He also feels a great deal of shame around the slightest misdeed, and he worries that the parent(s) will dislike or disapprove fairly constantly.  Of course, over time this becomes an identity, he will learn how to please others by being good so that they will approve and not leave or abandon him.  He lives his life now running from a terrible feeling of guilt.

The final scenario is found in the case of abuse – be it physical, emotional, mental or verbal, or sexual. In any of these cases the child becomes the whipping boy or girl for all of the parent’s unresolved issues.  Abuse teaches a child that she both deserves this abuse and that if she were just good enough she would stop being abused.  Of course, this can be mind boggling, since the child did not cause the abuse.  She may try to figure out how to make it stop, only to be abused yet again.   She may try and try to figure out how to make it stop, only to be abused yet again.  Having to live this way means that she will identify with this idea that if she could just find and push the magical button, by becoming a better person, she could make it stop.  This dynamic develops such a strong energy that it becomes a part of every relationship thereafter, until she finally figures out that she was never abused because she deserved it. Rather she was abused because abuse was her parent’s way of projecting his or her issue onto her.

These are just a few of the possible cases in which a child may develop a good guy identity, but in all cases, parents set the tone for the rest of the family regarding how to treat the good guy Of course the multiple relationships within a given family are complex and interwoven in intricate ways that would have to be pulled apart thread by thread for us to fully understand how members of a family react and interact with each other.  All we need to know for our purposes here, is that if the parent scapegoats the good guy, then other family members are likely to do the same.  Therefore, if, as in the first case scenario, the parent needs the child to sacrifice visibility, thereby becoming invisible for the parent, then other family members are also likely to make that child invisible.  If the child is kept very close to the parent, that child will be seen by other children as the parent’s favorite, the one who needs the parent the most, or the one who can’t do anything without the parent.  In these ways, then, the identity is reinforced by several people at once, creating many mirrors for the child to look into and see in themself the very same thing.

…the (above) scenarios may be mixed together in some variations of a theme.  But the bottom line is that the good guy is being required to carry, for the parent, the parent’s unresolved issues, so that he begins to identify with these issues at such an early age that it seems as if the identity is personality.  The authentic self is sacrified entirely and lost to conscious awareness, and the good guy lives only in the identity that continues to carry other people’s unresolved issues – even, in some cases, into death.

…These distortions of reality keep us burdened by and tied to a life of repetition where all we ever do is one thing – goodness – or what we perceive it to be.  The one who plays the good guy role for the family makes things look good for family members whose projections she has introjected (taken into herself).  The projector does not have to look to his own thoughts, attitudes, behaviours, beliefs, and choices to solve life’s problems; he just has to project onto the child who plays the good guy role.  And the one who plays the good guy does not have to look at her own pain to see how the feelings of abandonment, misjudgement, and lack of belonging have hurt – all she needs to do is be good.  This dance of mutual benefit – acted out by most of the relationships in the good guy’s adult life – keep the dance going and the music playing like a broken record.

Tough to read all of this but it seems to be chock full of pearls of wisdom.  I should imagine that in healing and becoming more conscious of this pattern we come to the point where we DO feel alot of hurt, anger, frustration and pain but those feelings are indeed necessary for us to find our freedom, we need to recognise them and learn from them so we can change patterns that we may have been playing out unconsciously for years.

a child who is particularly empathic is likely to be picked as the child to carry the projections regarding goodness and badness  (however there is a difference between feeling other’s feelings and carrying them and accepting projections).

All quoted sections taken from :  Letting Go of Good : Dispel the Myth of Goodness to Find Your Genuine Self.