Why It Takes Until Midlife to See a Dysfunctional Family
Many scapegoats don't accurately see their family system until midlife. Here's why the child's own wiring keeps the blinders on for decades — and what the "balcony view" costs, and gives you, once you finally have it.
Around midlife, many people who grew up in a dysfunctional family finally see it accurately—not from inside the drama, but from what I call the balcony view. You can observe the family almost like a petri dish and recognize the organism as a system. With that distance often comes a dark night of the soul: rage, rumination, complex trauma, and grief for the family you never had.
The view can feel both clarifying and destabilizing. Experiences that once seemed isolated begin to form a pattern, while the identity that helped you belong to the family starts to loosen.
Why the child can't see it
A child's programming is organized around survival through attachment. The family is part of your subject—simply the world as you know it. You have no other system for comparison and often idolize the people you depend on. Fully accepting that a parent is narcissistic or unsafe would be profoundly disturbing to that child's psyche.
You may have recognized pieces of the truth as a child, teenager, or young adult and suppressed them. The blinders were not stupidity. They were attachment patterns doing their job, even though they were built around an unhealthy system rather than truth.
That is why seeing often unfolds in layers. The adult mind can know something long before the attachment system and body are ready to accept what the knowledge means.
The geographic cure and the healing fantasy
I've seen many clients move away in their twenties—to another city, state, or country. Sometimes it is conscious; often the body simply wants distance. In midlife they return, or invite a parent to live with them, believing the family is relatively healthy or that loyalty will finally earn validation.
An emotionally starved child part may still chase that ounce of love through the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. Freud called the wider pattern repetition compulsion: the scapegoat repeats the familiar dynamic at work, in romance, and in friendship. The rational mind sees red flags, but the emotional brain and nervous system recognize the pattern as normal.
Returning home can therefore feel like care and loyalty while also reactivating the role-self. The healing fantasy says that enough patience or usefulness will finally produce the relationship the child needed.
You did see it — and you were punished for it
Many people later recover the memory that they did see the pattern early. As you differentiated in adolescence, you objected to rage, humiliation, or injustice. The parent used DARVO, became the victim, and made you the aggressor. Siblings were triangulated, while your empathy made you more likely to internalize shame and overfunction.
You were not necessarily selected as scapegoat because of weakness. You may have been the most resilient child, the most attuned to the environment, or the truth teller. Roles can fluctuate, but the mechanism follows the law of least effort: rather than self-reflect, the parent projects unowned shame onto one child and offloads the system's anxiety. You saw the family shadow but were not allowed to name it because you had become its carrier.
When your growth becomes the threat
Later, you may try Lindsay Gibson's guidance for adult children of emotionally immature parents: gray rock, keeping things on the surface, and accepting that the parent may never be emotionally available. That can help, but notice whether a healing fantasy remains underneath—a child part still hoping to be fully seen.
The peacekeeper can be both scapegoated and used as a resource. Because the aggression is covert, with plausible deniability, it is hard to explain. As you move toward differentiation and joy, the system may experience your growth as a threat and stop reaching out. The costs can include reputation, inheritance, or contact with extended family. It is a double bind, but ultimately your work is your own differentiation. Some clients notice anxiety, sleep, pain, or other symptoms worsening around renewed contact. That timing can be useful information to explore with an appropriate clinician, though it does not by itself prove a single cause.
The dark night — and the alchemy
What rises at midlife—memories, emotional flashbacks, disenfranchised grief, and righteous rage—is material you were trained to suppress. If anger was shamed as ungrateful or crazy, it may arrive with force. Fixated on, rage can drag you down; processed, it becomes fire for individuation.
Jung's alchemical picture is useful: blackening names trauma and complex grief; whitening is discernment, separating what is yours from what was projected onto you; reddening is transformation. Like the phoenix, a new identity emerges. You do not erase the older self. You transcend and include it, then release the dead wood that no longer serves truth, goodness, and beauty.
The balcony view is not a demand to condemn everyone below. It is enough to see the system more accurately, return what was projected onto you, and choose a life less organized around the old role.
▶️ Watch the full video
This post is drawn from my video Why It Takes Until Midlife to See a Dysfunctional Family (The Balcony View).
Where to go from here
You don't need to choose anything today — I just want you to know where the doors are.
📋 Start with the free map — take the free 80-item family-pattern questionnaire and download the Ascent Toolkit workbook. Together they help you identify patterns through Bowen, IFS, and Jungian frameworks before you decide what kind of support fits: 👉 https://blaketherapy.ca/the-ultimate-toolkit
🤝 Work through the next move one-on-one — use my booking page to choose a 1:1 consultation or individual session for your specific family dynamics and next decision: 👉 https://calendly.com/blake-andersons-session-invite
*Blake Anderson, BA, MSW, RSW is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist based in Toronto, Ontario. This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized therapy, medical care, legal advice, or crisis support.*In a narcissistic family, the child never knows when love is coming. That unpredictability — intermittent reinforcement — is what keeps you auditioning for affection long into adulthood. Here's how the pattern works, and how you can begin to reparent the child parts still waiting.
In the book The Narcissistic Family, the authors give a primary definition of what makes a family narcissistic: the children exist to serve the parents' needs. The emotional needs of the parent are the primary needs of the family — that's what motivates everything, rather than the children's needs.
That does not mean the family provides nothing. It means care is organized around the parent's emotional economy. The child is safest when easy, useful, flattering, or undemanding. Once the child has needs that interrupt that arrangement, affection can become conditional and confusing.
When your needs became the problem
In the early years, the child may be well provided for. A baby reflects positively on the family, so meeting those needs can feel easy. But as the child differentiates—through the terrible twos, adolescence, and a personality of their own—normal developmental needs are experienced as a burden. The child gets blamed for having them.
On the surface it can still look like parenting. The parents work, drive you to practice, meet school needs, and buy things. That is why the childhood is confusing. Emotionally, the child may still be starved. When you bring a genuine feeling, you are dismissed, lectured, or told you are selfish. Lindsay Gibson's work on emotionally immature parents helps name this. A child cannot easily decide the parent is wrong, especially when siblings support the story, so the conclusion becomes: maybe I am too much.
Hot and cold: how intermittent reinforcement traps you
Intermittent reinforcement means the child never knows when attention or affection will arrive. Some days your needs are met; on others you are dismissed. Praise depends on the parent's mood and supply. These are breadcrumbs scattered across a childhood.
The child naturally thinks, if I act this way, I get the praise, and conforms to the role. With no fully developed prefrontal cortex, dependent on the family and still using magical thinking, you keep experimenting. Clients describe it as Groundhog Day: repeating the interaction and hoping for a different result. I think of Doctor Strange searching millions of scenarios for the one that works. The scapegoat searches for the behaviour that will unlock reliable love. There is no such behaviour, because it was never about the child.
Why you couldn't win
There is usually little transparency or direct communication. The parent may triangulate by confiding negatively about a sibling or spouse; later you realize they probably spoke about you the same way. Trust erodes. With limited empathy and mentalization, the parent may not fully see the child as separate. DARVO reverses the roles and makes the child the problem.
The script follows you into adulthood: I must prove my worth to be loved. Some clients pour themselves into relationships or careers, hoping achievement will finally earn parental love. Even after gray rock or no contact, the conditioning can stay online, still waiting for the need to be met.
This is why insight alone may not end the pattern. You can understand intermittent reinforcement intellectually and still feel pulled toward the next breadcrumb. The nervous system learned through repetition that relief might arrive after one more effort, one more achievement, or one more perfectly worded conversation.
Reparenting: giving witness to the child in you
At a certain point, we realize the parent may never repair the wound. Carl Jung understood that the collective unconscious holds archetypal patterns of an inner mother and father that we can draw on even when our actual models were unhealthy.
Internal Family Systems, developed by Richard Schwartz, gives this practical shape. Map the ages where particular wounds occurred—perhaps an eight-, twelve-, or eighteen-year-old part. When needs go unmet, parts can become exiled. A present trigger then brings the past forward and overwhelms the rational mind.
Approach the younger part through the gaze of a healthy inner parent. Ask what it needs and hold space before trying to solve anything. Listen to the child's logic: Dad is working. Mom is too busy. I'm selfish. I need to behave. Then bring in what you know as an adult. Tell the child they are safe, that you will not abandon them, and that the burden belongs to the family—not to the child.
The goal is not to argue the child out of what it once believed. That belief was an intelligent adaptation to dependency. Witness it first, then offer a new experience: steadiness without performance, care without earning, and an adult presence that does not disappear when the child has a feeling.
Keep a safe inner place to return to if you become overwhelmed; some people use a neutral white room. Do this work with a licensed therapist. Over time, the child part can trust the capital-S Self, and emotional flashbacks lose some of their charge. Grief remains, but the original deprivation was never the child's fault and never theirs to control.
▶️ Watch the full video
This post is drawn from my video Trapped by Intermittent Reinforcement: Reparenting the Narcissistic Family Scapegoat.
Where to go from here
You don't need to choose anything today — I just want you to know where the doors are.
📋 Start with the free map — take the free 80-item family-pattern questionnaire and download the Ascent Toolkit workbook. Together they help you identify patterns through Bowen, IFS, and Jungian frameworks before you decide what kind of support fits: 👉 https://blaketherapy.ca/the-ultimate-toolkit
🏔️ Step into the holding space — The Ascent course + Sovereign Scapegoats community: the course is the map, the weekly live office hours are the guide, and the community is the container: 👉 https://the-holding-space.circle.so/checkout/the-ascent-quarterly
*Blake Anderson, BA, MSW, RSW is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist based in Toronto, Ontario. This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized therapy, medical care, legal advice, or crisis support.*Bowen family therapy gives you the map of the system. But a systems map alone can't fully name harm, responsibility, or cruelty. What changes when you set Bowen beside a moral lens — and Kierkegaard's aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres?
I've been reading the book Bowen Family Therapy in Christian Ministry, and it looks at two main lenses. The first is Bowen's systems perspective: understanding the family and the individual through the way they interact — the degree of differentiation, or the lack of it. The second is a Christian lens: original sin, a level of morality, and grace.
In most of my videos I anchor my approach in a humanist psychological lens — one that can be embraced by all. This isn't to say Christianity is the one or only perspective. But I find the contrast worth sitting with, because it exposes something a pure systems view can miss.
What Bowen sees — and what he doesn't
Bowen was very much a systematic theorist, studying the family from an evolutionary lens and a more humanist approach. He didn't create a stigma — or rather a diagnosis — of people as narcissistic or as having personality disorders. He focused on the function of the system. If a person in the family was causing issues, he would ask why that person was functioning the way they were within the system. Fusion of self was, for Bowen, the main dysfunction and the way harm occurs. He wouldn't blame individuals within the family unit; he saw it all from a systems perspective.
The book's critique is this: without a moral element — without some larger spiritual or religious framework — that view does a disservice to sin, to the way harm is actually caused to individuals, and to the fact that individuals make their own moral decisions and have free will.
A Kierkegaard-inspired lens on love
Kierkegaard is often read through three broad spheres of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. In the video, I use those spheres alongside Works of Love as a simplified lens on how love can be organized. This is an interpretive synthesis, not a claim that Kierkegaard presents the following as one formal three-step model.
- Aesthetic orientation — relationship organized mainly around preference, desire, and what pleases the self.
- Ethical orientation — commitment and duty: acting on what is right even when desire fluctuates.
- Religious orientation — in Kierkegaard's Christian framework, love grounded in a relationship to God and a duty of care toward one's neighbour.
Three lenses, one family
Take these three perspectives together — the book on Christian ministry, Kierkegaard's understanding of love, and Bowen family therapy — and you get a very rich approach, because I think all perspectives hold some degree of truth.
Bowen is helpful for understanding the system, but systems language does not erase individual choices. When a parent repeatedly privileges image, entitlement, or personal desire over a child's dignity, a moral lens asks what responsibility belongs to that parent. A religious reader may describe a home organized around ego rather than neighbour-love; a secular reader may speak in terms of conscience, reciprocity, and human rights. Neither requires diagnosing the family from a distance.
Not just a system — a sick system
You can still use Bowen here: the undifferentiated collective ego mass, the triangles, the emotional cutoff that so often occurs. Bowen would study those patterns and probably intervene to increase communication and help the family's functioning.
But if the observable pattern includes deception, coercion, or intentional cruelty, a systems map alone may not say enough. Religious language may call this sin; secular language may call it a failure of conscience or responsibility. The important move is to hold both truths: behaviour occurs in a system, and individuals remain accountable for the choices they make within it. That's why systems aren't always enough.
▶️ Watch the full video
This post is drawn from my video When Systems Aren't Enough: Why Toxic Families Require a Moral Lens.
Where to go from here
You don't need to choose anything today — I just want you to know where the doors are.
📋 Start with the free map — take the free 80-item family-pattern questionnaire and download the Ascent Toolkit workbook. Together they help you identify patterns through Bowen, IFS, and Jungian frameworks before you decide what kind of support fits: 👉 https://blaketherapy.ca/the-ultimate-toolkit
🧭 The map, guide, and container together — the Complete Recovery Package combines a six-session 1:1 process, the full assessment and written report, The Ascent course, and the community: 👉 https://the-holding-space.circle.so/checkout/11-coaching-the-ascent-assessment
*Blake Anderson, BA, MSW, RSW is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist based in Toronto, Ontario. This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized therapy, medical care, legal advice, or crisis support.*In The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout proposes repeated appeals to pity as a warning sign within a larger pattern of exploitation and evaded accountability. It is a lens for observing behaviour—not a shortcut for diagnosing a parent or sibling.
Stout's book cites an estimate that about 4% of the population could fit what she calls sociopathy and describes the pattern in terms of severely impaired conscience. That estimate and framing belong to Stout; they do not divide every family neatly into a labelled 4% and an unaffected remainder, and a reader cannot determine another person's diagnosis or inner capacity for attachment from an essay.
What we can examine is behaviour over time: repeated deception, calculated harm, strategic displays of concern, and little meaningful repair after harm is named. In other videos I have called the ability to read another person's feelings and use that knowledge strategically cold empathy. That describes an observable interpersonal pattern; it does not by itself prove that a person has no conscience, attachment, or care.
Stout's warning sign: the repeated pity play
Stout presents the chronic pity play as one warning sign: a person repeatedly frames themselves as the injured party, uses half-truths to recruit sympathy, and redirects attention away from what they did. An isolated appeal for compassion is normal and proves nothing. The concern is the sequence—harm, confrontation, self-victimization, and no repair—repeated across situations.
You can see a small version in a police-chase video: after dangerous behaviour, the person immediately explains how they were wronged. The useful question is not whether we can see inside their conscience. It is whether pity is repeatedly being used to erase accountability.
When the scapegoat stands up: betrayal, DARVO, and the smear
Now consider a family incident in which a parent or sibling causes harm, responds with little regard for its impact, and then objects when the scapegoat names it. The objection is reframed as betrayal, while the original behaviour disappears.
George Simon describes the mirror-image vulnerability of the overconscientious person: they assume too much responsibility and feel remorse even when the problem is not theirs. That is often where the scapegoat gets caught.
When accountability is consistently absent, the family may smear the person who will not return to role, framing them as negative while recruiting sympathy from others. That is the observable structure of DARVO: deny the concern, attack the person raising it, and reverse victim and offender. A sibling or flying monkey with a hero complex may be triangulated in, while the scapegoat's active conscience turns the sympathy card into guilt.
One more sobering pattern from the video: smearing can begin while you are still being idealized. Allies may be recruited early, so you enter a dinner party where others have already heard a damaging version of events while the person spreading it appears patient and conciliatory.
The suffering child: how the sympathy card hooks you
Sam Vaknin uses the dual mothership model to describe another presentation: the parent appears as a suffering child in need of rescue, activating the caregiving reflex in a son or daughter. The child may come to believe that enough love will finally stabilize the parent.
Whatever the parent's private intention, the observable effect can be parentification or emotional incest: the child is asked to soothe and parent the adult in ways that are not age-appropriate. The sympathy card works because empathy is real, attachment is real, and the younger part still hopes care will become mutual.
Radical acceptance — and taking your empathy back
You do not need a verdict about someone's diagnosis or conscience to make a discerning decision. Ask what happens when harm is named. Do they show curiosity, responsibility, and sustained repair? Or does pity repeatedly reset the cycle while the same behaviour continues?
Radical acceptance means responding to the relationship's demonstrated capacity, not to a remote label. The adult part can observe the pattern while a younger part still longs for parental care. Reparenting helps you return to that wound without feeding a sympathy card that repeatedly converts your empathy into guilt and shame. Your empathy remains a strength; discernment determines where it is safe to place it.
▶️ Watch the full video
This post is drawn from my video The Sociopath Next Door: How Predatory Parents Weaponize Pity & Smear the Scapegoat.
Where to go from here
You don't need to choose anything today — I just want you to know where the doors are.
📋 Start with the free map — take the free 80-item family-pattern questionnaire and download the Ascent Toolkit workbook. Together they help you identify patterns through Bowen, IFS, and Jungian frameworks before you decide what kind of support fits: 👉 https://blaketherapy.ca/the-ultimate-toolkit
🤝 Work through the next move one-on-one — use my booking page to choose a 1:1 consultation or individual session for your specific family dynamics and next decision: 👉 https://calendly.com/blake-andersons-session-invite
*Blake Anderson, BA, MSW, RSW is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist based in Toronto, Ontario. This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized therapy, medical care, legal advice, or crisis support.*Carl Jung used the alchemist's dream of turning lead into gold as a map of the psyche. For the scapegoat who limits or goes no contact, his three phases — the blackening, the whitening, and the reddening — describe the work of integrating your own shadow, and the family's projected shadow, into a higher synthesis of self.
Carl Jung used the alchemical transformation of lead into gold as a metaphor for psychological change. His three phases offer the scapegoat a way to think about facing personal shadow and family projection, separating one from the other, and integrating both into the larger synthesis Jung called individuation.
Lead into gold: the myths Jung drew on
Jung relied on certain myths to illustrate the process. He connected it back to the ancient Egyptian story of Osiris, who had to be broken down, taken apart, and reformed to become a new self — Osiris had to die to himself and go into the underworld to become a different person. The Greeks drew from the same well with the phoenix, the fire-bird of transformation.
A modern version of these myths is Jean Grey in X-Men. Her extraordinary attunement parallels the sensitivity many scapegoats develop from monitoring a parent's or sibling's moods and walking on eggshells. Hypervigilance can become real perceptiveness about others. I stay skeptical like a scientist about claims beyond that, but the parallel holds.
Here's the caution in the story: before Jean becomes the phoenix, she becomes the dark phoenix. Her powers are so strong that the dark energy takes over — in the comics she destroys a planet. Transformation and dark energy are closely linked, and the scapegoat or empath can be overwhelmed in the same way. The shadow you're integrating is powerful.
Nigredo — the blackening
Jung's first phase is the nigredo, the blackening: the raw, dark material of the psyche and the dark night of the soul. This is the complex trauma — the difficult memories, the emotional neglect or abuse, the ways you were mistreated in the family and projected upon, and how you most likely internalized that. Maybe it showed up as decisions you weren't happy about, relationships that didn't work out or were abusive, financial issues. However it landed, the internalized introjects and the ways the family left you disenfranchised created this blackening in your life. And like Jean, you can get stuck there — stuck in the dark energy, in your own shadow or in the projection, defending yourself, splitting or blending with certain parts of the self.
Albedo — the whitening
The second phase is the whitening: clarifying what is your own and what is not. You have to go through the dark night of the soul, then separate the family's projection from your own shadow and your own self. You typically don't want to face this, and it often feels like — and in a real sense is — a death. You have to die to the former self you had within the family unit, to the way you understood life and yourself inside it, and you have to grieve those relationships. There's always a temptation to slip back into the blackening. The force that's transforming you has a death quality to it, because you're letting go of a former identity — and that's the only way you can transform.
Rubedo — the reddening
The third phase is the reddening: the new becoming of self. You integrate the lead — the dark parts of you — with the insights of consciousness to form a higher synthesis, one that is not reliant on the dysfunctional family but stands in complete sovereignty of oneself. This is the phoenix of the myths. And yet, like Jean, the high sensitivity remains, the family's narratives and projections can still distort your truth, and there's always a risk of stalling or regressing. It's no straight line.
How do you know where you are?
Typically, when you go no contact, the dark night comes first. Repressed memories surface — in dreams, or in the myths, stories, and movies that suddenly resonate. There's a lot of grief and despair to lean into, and the old ego wants to retreat into the fantasy bond and fuse again with the family system. Gaslighting and the pull of the family will try to draw the scapegoat back in.
As you stop debating the introjects and respond less automatically to attempts to pull you back, clarity can grow. You become more differentiated and steadier in yourself. Integrating memories takes time, reflection, support, and inner work. Gradually, you may feel less burdened by the past and less governed by old scripts. That's the reddening: more freedom, wisdom, and room to live from your own identity.
▶️ Watch the full video
This post is drawn from my video The Alchemical Scapegoat: Carl Jung's 3 Phases of Healing Family Trauma.
Where to go from here
You don't need to choose anything today — I just want you to know where the doors are.
📋 Start with the free map — take the free 80-item family-pattern questionnaire and download the Ascent Toolkit workbook. Together they help you identify patterns through Bowen, IFS, and Jungian frameworks before you decide what kind of support fits: 👉 https://blaketherapy.ca/the-ultimate-toolkit
📽️ Study the maps themselves — explore the Slide Vault: 245 indexed slide files from my teaching library, refreshed through July 2026, with a guide and links back to relevant videos: 👉 https://the-holding-space.circle.so/checkout/blake-anderson-rsw-slide-vault
*Blake Anderson, BA, MSW, RSW is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist based in Toronto, Ontario. This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized therapy, medical care, legal advice, or crisis support.*Every time you went back, you thought it would be different. Here's what the journey after limiting or going no contact actually looks like — the hoovering, the double bind, the dark night of the soul, and what slowly gets easier.
If you grew up as the scapegoat, you may have lived through the same cycle many times: you left, limited contact, were hoovered, and eventually went back believing the relationship would be different.
The book Narcissistic Families, drawing on the adult-children-of-alcoholics tradition, gives us the image of going back to the well. Each time you return, you hope the water will nourish you; each time it makes you sick. Staying engaged with an unhealthy family system can cost you your identity, nervous system, health, and differentiation.
Why you kept going back
From a young age you were conditioned to appease and look outside yourself for validation. If you became the peacekeeper or truth teller, you may also have been parentified—used as a therapist or listening ear for a parent's conflicts. The scapegoat carries the family's unowned shame and keeps trying to solve a problem that was never theirs.
Eventually you realize you cannot fix yourself into being treated well, and you cannot wake the system up for it. Intellectually you may understand this first; a younger part still wants the family. That is where grief begins.
Why they don't respect your no
The narcissistic parent may not experience you as a fully separate person. You are treated as an extension, so asserting your identity and limits does not register as ordinary adulthood; it registers as betrayal. The response is often sibling triangulation, DARVO, and half-truths that make you appear unreasonable.
Bowen called the fused family an undifferentiated collective ego mass. When one person differentiates, the whole system's anxiety rises. Taking ownership could collapse the false self and the family image, so the system discredits the person naming what happened.
Not every difficult family requires no contact. A member of my group put the discernment question simply: is this person safe or unsafe? Tailor the protocol to the actual pattern. Contact decisions are individual and may involve immediate safety, health, dependency, caregiving, children, or legal realities. A licensed clinician—and, where relevant, a lawyer or domestic-violence resource—can help you think through those factors. When the well repeatedly makes you sick and there is no accountability, some form of distance may be worth considering.
The hoovering and the double bind
When you pull away, you may encounter emotional baiting: an emergency, a hook, anything that makes you reactive enough to fall into the old shame pattern. It plays on the trauma bond and conditioning laid down very young. When the assigned carrier stops holding the projection, the system may become desperate and eventually choose another scapegoat.
Then comes the double bind: Did I make the right decision? This is my family—maybe I'm wrong. The family still lives inside as introjects. Jerry Wise calls this the family's emotional Wi-Fi: distance raises the system's anxiety, flying monkeys appear, and the abnormal normalcy tries to restore itself. A child part may still hold a healing fantasy, persuaded by future faking and apologies that never become change.
What you do differently this time
This time, do not take the bait and do not JADE—justify, argue, defend, or explain. If a response is needed, give it a day or two so you are acting from your own judgment rather than the system's anxiety. Write a personal Bill of Rights: the limits you hold and the consequences you will follow through on for yourself. You may not need to announce them; you can live by your code.
For anticipatory anxiety—what if my mother shows up?—I use Tim Ferriss's fear-setting exercise: picture the feared event, challenge the catastrophe, and plan your response. Role-play it with a partner, friend, or therapist. The traumatized mind assumes the past will repeat; a plan helps it stop filling every gap with threat.
The dark night of the soul — and what gets easier
After a year or two, you may still be in the dark night of the soul: watching close families and asking, why did I have to have this? Radical acceptance includes grieving the parents and siblings you never truly had. Rage and old memories may surface as the nervous system finally has space to recognize them.
For some clients, becoming a parent brings another layer of clarity: I would never treat my child that way. That recognition can deepen the grief, but it can also interrupt the inherited script and clarify the kind of parent or person they want to be.
The family remains inside to some degree, so notice the old scripts without confusing them for the Self. In Internal Family Systems terms, your adult self can witness the younger child, offer safety, and return burdens that never belonged to them. Around healthy people, while caring for your body and mind, it gets easier—not because the past changes, but because you are no longer going back to the well.
▶️ Watch the full video
This post is drawn from my video When You Stop "Going Back to the Well" (The Reality of No Contact).
Where to go from here
You don't need to choose anything today — I just want you to know where the doors are.
📋 Start with the free map — take the free 80-item family-pattern questionnaire and download the Ascent Toolkit workbook. Together they help you identify patterns through Bowen, IFS, and Jungian frameworks before you decide what kind of support fits: 👉 https://blaketherapy.ca/the-ultimate-toolkit
🏔️ Step into the holding space — The Ascent course + Sovereign Scapegoats community: the course is the map, the weekly live office hours are the guide, and the community is the container: 👉 https://the-holding-space.circle.so/checkout/the-ascent-quarterly
*Blake Anderson, BA, MSW, RSW is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist based in Toronto, Ontario. This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized therapy, medical care, legal advice, or crisis support.*What do large language models and narcissists have in common? More than you'd think. Mirroring, snapshots, code that wants to replicate itself — and why learning to read the code protects your vitality.
Large language models work in a simple way: they take your input — a prompt — and generate a response from it. Whatever intent and context you feed the AI, it predicts what you're looking for and extends your own thinking back to you. Very helpful for many people. But once you've been on the receiving end of a narcissist, you notice something uncomfortably similar: they mirror you too.
In the video, I use a deliberately provocative metaphor: a person who relies heavily on mirroring and a false self can seem present on the surface while the relationship feels shallow or empty underneath. Think of the Terminator looking human from the outside while running on hidden programming. This is a metaphor for a relational pattern, not a claim that anyone is less human or literally machine-like.
The snapshot — and the rage when you break it
Much like an AI, a highly narcissistic person may read facial expressions, words, and emotions without meeting you with the same mutuality. Some writers call this cold empathy: accurately reading another person while using the information instrumentally. What comes back can feel like a template of a parent or sibling — mirroring your context rather than showing genuine curiosity about you.
When you stop conforming to that snapshot, the challenge to the role can trigger anger that feels severe and out of proportion. The useful distinction is that the reaction may be aimed less at what you actually said than at the fact that you no longer fit the image the family assigned you.
Reading the code: Agent Smith and the Matrix
The deepest injuries usually come when you challenge their image of themselves — the false self. You start to pierce the illusion, see through the AI, see the way they're coded. And once you understand how these systems work — many of you have absorbed the research and the traits associated with narcissism — you start to read the code, and you notice that narcissists act very similarly, despite different types and expressions.
In the metaphor, the code tries to replicate itself. Like Agent Smith in The Matrix, the family pattern pulls people back into fusion and resists anyone waking up to it. The pattern also adapts: as you change, the tactics used to restore conformity may change too.
That does not tell us exactly what another person understands or intends. It gives us a way to recognize a repeated structure without pretending we can see inside someone else's mind.
The architecture of the illusion
Seeing the code helps you compare patterns. In a reciprocal relationship, someone listens, stays curious, and lets new information change how they see you. An emotionally unavailable parent may still provide resources and do some things well, yet relate mainly through a template of what a parent should be. The public architecture can look safe and loving while the child's interior life receives little attention. That distinction can be painful without requiring an all-good or all-bad verdict.
Seeing the code — and protecting your vitality
As you individuate and start to see the pattern, you can set limits on how much it organizes your life. The right contact choice depends on the person, the history, and practical safety. With more distance from the old role, some people notice greater clarity or regulation; the point is to observe your own data rather than promise a particular outcome.
This can be lifelong work because family patterns adapt. Knowledge and wisdom are the counter-moves: you see the structure clearly, disclose with discernment, and learn to distinguish mutual relationship from a recurring pattern of mirroring and role enforcement.
▶️ Watch the full video
This post is drawn from my video The Narcissist as AI: Mirroring, "The Matrix," and Breaking the Code.
Where to go from here
You don't need to choose anything today — I just want you to know where the doors are.
📋 Start with the free map — take the free 80-item family-pattern questionnaire and download the Ascent Toolkit workbook. Together they help you identify patterns through Bowen, IFS, and Jungian frameworks before you decide what kind of support fits: 👉 https://blaketherapy.ca/the-ultimate-toolkit
🤖 A guide in your pocket — the Sovereign Scapegoat GPT is an AI tool for psychoeducation and guided reflection between videos or sessions — not therapy or crisis support; use it without entering identifying details: 👉 https://the-holding-space.circle.so/sovereign-scapegoat-gbt
*Blake Anderson, BA, MSW, RSW is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist based in Toronto, Ontario. This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized therapy, medical care, legal advice, or crisis support.*The scapegoat is often attacked for the one thing that should be safest: showing up as themselves. Here's what Jung's idea of the persona explains about the family's false self — and why your authenticity felt like a threat.
In narcissistic families, the problem usually isn't that people have different personalities or that one person is sensitive and another is blunt. Something deeper is going on. The family is built on a false self — and when you show up as your authentic self, you become a threat to it.
Usually there's a parent who is the most narcissistic one, and they're the one pushing the false self and the false narrative of the family. Sometimes both parents co-create it; sometimes one is more overtly narcissistic and the other is more enabling. But the shape is the same: the narcissist isn't a fully formed self, so they build masks and personas to protect an image. There's no solid foundation underneath — it's a house of cards on sand. And at some level they know it. They also know that you, the scapegoat, are more genuinely yourself. That's exactly why your authenticity provokes them.
Tone policing and the moving goalposts
I've had many clients describe the same two experiences: tone policing and goalposts that keep moving.
The narcissistic parent tells the scapegoat their tone is off, that they're being too critical, too sensitive, too much. The content changes, but the message underneath is constant: there's something wrong with how you're showing up. For the character-disturbed person, this is functional. They don't want you to have a strong sense of self, because your self-doubt is what keeps you available as a source of supply. If you're rooted in your own values and interests, you're harder to manipulate and harder to get under the skin of — and that's threatening.
Because these roles were conditioned from a very young age, the goalposts were always moving. You never quite measured up, so you learned to perform. You built your own persona — a role-self — because simply being yourself wasn't safe.
The three S's: how love became a performance
In these families, you often earn your place by providing three things: status, services, and safety.
- Status — you make the parent look good. Your job, your partner, the praise you get at the party — it reflects onto them, and the next day you might get a little more golden shine.
- Services — you help, you're useful, there's a transactional dependency.
- Safety — as long as you're obedient and go along, you score high. But the moment you show up as your authentic self, your "safety score" takes a hit, because to the narcissist, authenticity reads as a threat.
So from a young age you absorbed a script: love and acceptance have to be earned by performing. And that script rarely stays in the family. It follows you into work and into romantic relationships — the chronic need to prove your worth, the hyper-vigilance, the sense that the rug could be pulled out from under you at any moment.
The reveal — and coming home to yourself
Here's what Jung's idea of the persona clarifies: we all wear social masks depending on context. You're different at a wedding than at a bar watching the game, and that's fine. But the more authentic you are, the more consistent you stay across those contexts — you're still anchored in your values. The more inauthentic the person, the more drastic the masks.
That's why the reveal is so jarring. At some event — a wedding, a graduation — you watch a sibling or parent become almost a different person with their friends: the superficial charm, sometimes even a different energy or name. Once you've woken up to the dynamics, you can't un-see it. And it's disturbing precisely because you value being real.
You can't control these people. At some point you accept that this is who they are. The work is to stop auditioning: associate with people who see you for who you are, notice the inner voice still telling you to perform, ground your nervous system when the old social anxiety spikes, and keep casting a daily vote — through your habits and choices — for the person you actually are. That's what it means to come home to yourself.
▶️ Watch the full video
This post is drawn from my video Why Narcissistic Families Punish Authenticity | The Scapegoat & Jung's Persona.
Where to go from here
You don't need to choose anything today — I just want you to know where the doors are.
📋 Start with the free map — take the free 80-item family-pattern questionnaire and download the Ascent Toolkit workbook. Together they help you identify patterns through Bowen, IFS, and Jungian frameworks before you decide what kind of support fits: 👉 https://blaketherapy.ca/the-ultimate-toolkit
🤖 A guide in your pocket — the Sovereign Scapegoat GPT is an AI tool for psychoeducation and guided reflection between videos or sessions — not therapy or crisis support; use it without entering identifying details: 👉 https://the-holding-space.circle.so/sovereign-scapegoat-gbt
Blake Anderson, BA, MSW, RSW is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist based in Toronto, Ontario. This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized therapy, medical care, legal advice, or crisis support.
