True Colors

I grew up a scapegoated kid to two parents who never fully healed their own childhood wounds, and instead projected their pain and unresolve onto their kids. 

There's a lot of us like this out there. 

On top of this though, I was born on my parent's anniversary. We could have shared the day with a lot of love. Instead the day ended up with most of the focus put on me, I feel, as a distraction. "Focus on Brooke, and we don't have to focus on our marriage or each other." The day has always been shared with two people I love, who weren't exactly friends or partners. The day has always involved some element of distress and relief, my presence being the relief and distraction from their problems. 

But I'm not here to talk about my upbringing, I'm here to talk about the true colors that show when projection and scapegoating does happen. Because believe it or not, your parent or anyone projecting onto you is sometimes not ill-intended. It is sometimes not rooted in addiction to coping with their own pain. And always, it has nothing to do with you. Most of the time, anyone who projects onto you is either angry and tries to communicate that through an attack, or they are asking for help in the only way they know how: by living out and demonstrating the exact thing that happened to them, so that someone, will understand. Problem is for adult scapegoated kids, they asked you, the wrong person. 

But how do you know the difference between one person/parent/partner who uses you to demonstrate their pain, out of a desire to be known, heard, understood and ultimately, find healing, and the one who is wildly negligent, feeding their own cancer, using you to cope? The bottom line? Accountability. The bottom line? Empathy. The bottom line? Ownership of their action having a negative impact on you and your life. 

But here's the saddest part. The one who is wildly negligent needs more help. The one who is wildly negligent and arrogant is further down a path of self-destruction. This is where I urge folks to step away from the relational dynamic you have with someone who is wildly negligent and arrogant, who is narcissistic. Make them look in the mirror with your absence. Hold them accountable with your silence and your boundaries around accessibility to you. Why? Because they are in bondage where the devil is speaking right out of their mouths. They are crippled or being crippled by the instability of manipulation, deflection and lying. They are operating out of survival to a degree that shouldn't be humanly possible. So if you step away and say "no thanks" to that behavior and relational dynamic, there's the chance they will "come to"; they'll wake up. Problem is, we need the collective effort in our world to stop allowing the behavior and dynamic to continue. This is where your "no" matters. This is where your "no" shows your values and character. Because what you say yes to, will continue on. True colors show in what you refuse to allow into your life; if you're operating out of survival like the narcissist, you'll block out every blessing that's meant for you. 

-B