The Scapegoat Diagnosis: When Your Entire Family Needs Therapy but Only Sends You
By Michael Kelman Portney
There are four mentally ill people in this family. And three of them are pointing at me.
That’s not a punchline. That’s the shape of a life.
It’s a pattern so common it deserves its own entry in the DSM—Family-Induced False Diagnosis Disorder (FIFDD): the phenomenon where the one person seeking truth, therapy, or healing becomes the repository for every other family member’s denial, projection, and unresolved shame.
You are not crazy. You’re the scapegoat.
And it’s killing you slowly.
The Anatomy of a Scapegoat
Scapegoating is the oldest trick in the psychological warfare playbook. The term itself comes from the Book of Leviticus, where the sins of the community were symbolically laid on a goat and cast into the wilderness.
If you grew up being labeled the difficult one, the dramatic one, the mentally ill one—congratulations. You were cast into the emotional wilderness by people who didn’t want to look at their own shit.
It looks like this:
You get upset about something real.
You express it—calmly, honestly, even compassionately.
They dismiss it. Then accuse you. Then escalate.
Suddenly you’re the one being scrutinized. Your tone. Your words. Your mental health.
This is not an accident. It’s a system.
Emotional Enmeshment and Weaponized Invalidation
In scapegoat families, boundaries are seen as aggression. Autonomy is seen as betrayal. Healing is seen as rebellion.
When you bring up therapy, they say:
“We tried that, it didn’t work.”
“It’s just going to be you attacking us.”
“You’re the only one who needs help.”
You offer facts—on trauma, on the nervous system, on autism—and you get:
“Are you on drugs?”
“That’s just an excuse.”
“You’ve always been like this.”
That’s not just ignorance. That’s willful ignorance, because learning would mean owning harm. And your family is too fragile, too narcissistically wounded, or too performatively “normal” to admit their dysfunction. So they create a mental illness narrative about you and perform a psychiatric exorcism.
The DBT Trap
You’re told to go to therapy. Maybe DBT. Trauma group. Behavioral modification. You’re told that you need to “learn how to regulate.”
Here’s the catch: they don’t want you regulated. They want you neutralized. They want you medicated, numbed, pacified, and quieted—so they never have to hear about the wreckage they caused.
“We’ll support your healing.”
No. What they mean is:
“We’ll support your sedation. Not your truth.”
When Science Doesn’t Matter
You send them articles. Peer-reviewed studies. Trauma research. Maybe even your own diagnosis.
You tell them your nervous system fires like a car alarm in the morning. You explain the hypervigilance, the cortisol surges, the sleep issues. You connect the dots.
They respond with:
"That sounds like a you problem."
Because it is literally easier for them to believe that you are broken beyond repair than to believe they played a role in that breaking. To them, your pain is a narrative threat. If they validate it, even a little, their whole false identity collapses.
The Collusion of Denial
Families like this work like a cartel.
One person scapegoats.
Another co-signs it.
A third enables the denial by staying silent.
Now you’re surrounded. Outnumbered. Every truth you bring forward is filtered through a system that has already decided it doesn’t want the truth.
They’ll say you’re isolating yourself. But isolation is the system’s goal—to starve you of allies, so your reality starts to unravel. So you start asking: “Am I crazy?”
You’re not. You’re outnumbered.
What They Say vs. What They Mean
You: “I want us to do family therapy.”
Them: “That’s a bridge too far.”
Translation: “We will never sit in a room where a professional might side with you.”
You: “This is affecting my health.”
Them: “You need help.”
Translation: “Your suffering makes us uncomfortable. Fix it alone.”
You: “We all need healing.”
Them: “You’re the only one who’s broken.”
Translation: “Let us keep pretending.”
The Reek Effect
When your nervous system has been trained to expect rejection, shame, and gaslighting from your own family, your body begins to betray you.
You wake up, and you’re in fight-or-flight before you’ve had your first thought. That’s not weakness. That’s Reek-mode—named after the broken, tortured version of Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones.
Like Reek, you were trained to anticipate pain, to flinch before the blow, to apologize for existing. That’s trauma memory—not dysfunction. Your body is trying to protect you from a threat that lives in your bloodline.
Breaking the Diagnosis
Here’s the radical truth:
If you’re the only one in your family who’s questioning things, reading, researching, asking for therapy, setting boundaries, naming trauma—you are not sick. You are waking up in a burning building where everyone else is pretending they don’t smell smoke.
They’ll keep calling you crazy. Let them.
You’re not the problem. You’re the symptom of a problem they refuse to face.
The Way Out
Stop trying to be understood by people committed to misunderstanding you. They need you broken so they can stay whole. Let that go.
Reclaim your story. Start writing. Start documenting. Start owning your narrative.
Build a chosen family. Find people who don’t flinch when you speak the truth. Who don’t pathologize your pain.
Use their accusations as proof. Every time they say you’re the problem, write it down. It’s evidence. Not just for courts or therapists—but for you. Proof that you’ve been sane this entire time.
Say it plainly.
"There are four mentally ill people in this family. And three of them are pointing at me."
Final Diagnosis
You’re not unstable. You’re just standing up in a collapsing house.
You’re not broken. You’re responding to a broken system.
You’re not mentally ill. You’re surrounded by people who refuse to acknowledge their own.
And the longer you play along, the sicker you’ll get. The sooner you stop defending yourself and start declaring yourself, the sooner you’ll feel free.
So go ahead. Let them keep pointing fingers.
You already know the truth.
You were the only one who ever wanted to heal.
