The Scapegoat’s Guide to Finding Love

I saw love as a blurred, distant figure. It was never something close to me—just an idea, a concept, almost like a collage mostly from films, books, and music.

I am a former scapegoat. In my family system, my parents chose me as the person to blame for all their issues—the scapegoat—while my sister could do no wrong, the golden child.

As I write this, I realize I don’t quite have the words to fully capture what happened. Describing myself as the ‘person to blame for all their issues’ doesn’t do justice to my experience and may not make sense to those who haven’t lived through something similar.

It reminds me of the time I told a friend, who came from a more stable family, about my upbringing. She could not, for the life of her, understand why I had to go no contact with my parents. What I saw as an act of ultimate courage in myself, she saw as an act of madness.

No, we are no longer friends.

But if you saw the term “scapegoat” and you are here with me through these sentences and words, then you know. YOU know what I am about to describe. The hurt of being told that you are loved, but because you are so bad, you are always being punished. Because you are so bad and flawed, you are never good enough.

Growing up, the unloved seek love. They want to find the person who will sweep them away, wipe their tears, and make them feel alive. Some may even dare to say, happy. But through some twist of fate, often seen as a painful reminder of their flawed nature, see, I told you, nobody can love you, the unloved children become unloved adults, with very few options.

As someone unloved who mistook the grotesque for affection, I want to share with you the little I know about it. Even though my story won’t change your mind, I believe it will. Maybe, in the midst of deciding if someone is good for you, you’ll remember my words on what love is.

Love is Being Loved for Who You Are

It’s hard to imagine being loved for who you are when your parents rejected you for exactly that. Even if on a surface level, some of us acknowledge that what our parents did— not loving their child—is horrific, the deep programming they placed inside us continues to be at work. It requires continuous, sustained effort to notice the toxic beliefs and act against them. When these beliefs are at work, we value the people criticizing us. They have a point, don’t they?

I mean, my shirt wasn’t that flattering on me.

But what kind of person would take their time to point out how ill-dressed I am? When other people compliment us, it feels icky, doesn’t it? Like a shoe that doesn’t fit well.

They are just saying it for the sake of saying it. Or perhaps their standards are low. Does that sound familiar?

If it does, you are more likely to value and be attracted to people who show you that they can’t see the best in others and are prone to being quite nasty, to be frank. They might even slip you a covert invitation to a performance act. Oh, if you could dress better, and be quieter and less talkative, then, only then, your coworker will notice you. After all, your coworker always gives you hints on what they like and dislike, and all you have to do is do more of the things he loves and he’ll fall in love with you!

But when someone loves the performance, when someone acts as a bandmaster, raising their hand, and being so comfortable instructing and accepting someone who wants to be instructed, that is not someone who can love; it is someone who has a need. And you seem like the perfect candidate for the job. Love is also very much tied to who we are as humans, not what we do. When love is tied to what we do, it invites exploitation, not a relationship on equal grounds.

If someone loves you only when you contort yourself to become and do their bidding, isn’t that more resembling the relationship between a master and a slave than between two lovers? If you take space, if you set boundaries, and make yourself unlovable to someone, they can’t love you at all. The most fulfilling love is being seen for who we are and loved for it.

Love is Conditional (Yet the Conditions Have to Be Reasonable)

All adult relationships are conditional. Except for the relationship I have with my cat. She bites me, I love her. She bites me again, I still love her.

But you see, between two humans, both being aware of the range of consciousness and the ability for great good and great evil, there are conditions. Now, here we can go haywire, but I’ll stop you before we end up there.

The conditions must be discussed in the beginning and they must be reasonable, meaning they are spoken by someone who wants to protect their own heart, not inflict pain on another. So what do reasonable conditions look like?

A reasonable condition would be something like, “I don’t want you to cheat on me emotionally or physically. If you do that, I will leave.”

An unreasonable condition may be, and probably spoken from the point of view of someone with no tenderness in their heart, “I don’t want you to look old. So you better take good care of yourself.”

While staying in shape and eating well is a reasonable condition, weight fluctuations do happen, and aging, well, that’s not something anyone can avoid, including the person who sets the condition.

If you are a young woman who’s dating a man making fun of older women, keep in mind that he is making fun of an inevitable process that he will not avoid either, but somehow is blind to his own aging and uses other people’s aging as a weapon against them. How can you expect love from someone like that? You don’t.

To wrap things up, you should have terms and conditions for your love. You should know them and communicate them, but you should also pay attention to the unspoken terms and conditions for the other person’s affection, and whether they are reasonable or a weapon toward exploiting the other party.

Love is Truth

Have you ever fallen for someone yet can’t quite put your finger on why you are so into them? The song “I Hate Everything About You” by Three Days Grace paints the perfect picture of being so attracted to someone, so enmeshed with someone you … hate.

These relationships often happen almost as a compulsion, when two people meet, with a void in their chest, and somehow, each one has something the other person misses, and above all reason, your psyche demands fulfilling those needs in a way your conscious self cannot, will not, be able to stop.

The codependent-narcissist dynamic is perhaps the easiest dynamic to see in this spot. When the person with a weak sense of identity and a deep need for feeling needed is love-bombed by a person with a strong sense of identity, someone who has their truth so strong, they would walk all over people and boundaries to get their needs met. The codependent can’t ask that, yet is completely comfortable with abiding by a relationship where the narcissist first love-bombs, then devalues the other person, making them “earn” love, distracting them from the notion that they are not offering any love.

But back to the notion, love is truth.

When you can see the other person as who they are, when you wait to know the other person and are in a space where you no longer fall in love solely in your imagination, and when triggered by distance, then, you love a real person. Not just a projection.

When stripped away from the power games and the ability to make the other person feel insecure, narcissists are quite dull individuals. Their whole shtick is playing a distraction game. Oh, no, don’t look at me and what I am offering you! No, look at you and how unlovable you are because I am NOT offering you that.

When you reach a certain level of self-esteem and know you are worthy of love, you can receive it from others. And when the other person, instead of showing you a good time, makes you feel miserable, that’s just a sign they don’t have what it takes to be your partner.

Because your partner, truthfully, has lovable traits and behaves in lovable ways.

Your partner’s beauty (both physical and emotional) should leave you in awe. You should know what’s so great about them because if you don’t, you might just be acting in a way to prove your worth to someone who has a whole game rigged to turn you into a slave while claiming your worth.

A Little Game I Play to Find Out if I Am Loved

When all other compasses fail to tell where north is, seek directions in your heart. What would it take for YOU to behave as your partner behaves?

How would you feel towards someone to be able to replicate the very same behaviors? Perhaps you would need a pen and paper. Perhaps you’ll end up terrified, perhaps you’ll end up relieved.

A lot of scapegoats have a lot of empathy for others, but too little for themselves. Using imagination exercises like this can help you get an inkling of what it would take for another human to feel and do what they are doing.