Scapegoat Fatigue: The Awareness Tax

The emotional cost of seeing what others deny and being punished for naming it. Part I

Good Evening, Data Collector!

I hope you all have been well and adjusting to the change in time. I always feel this time of year feels like the plane is getting ready to land. After buzzing around all year. Boy, has it been a year.

I sat at my desk today after one of those naps that send you into another dimension.

These sorts of reflections are vulnerable for me because, as someone in my “position”—whatever that means, who has influence, whether that be because I have a public-facing account, I’m a licensed clinician, xyz. People place you in a role, and that role comes with an unconscious contract you never signed. Expectations on what you’re allowed to name and what you’re not. This safari journey has been a hell of a ride for me. It highlights mob behaviors in people that many of us experienced from our own parents or family and now from people in society, the workplace, or even in the families we’ve created.

This week, my sessions were full of scapegoat fatigued clients. Fed up with following the lead of everyone else who tiptoes around certain family members, tolerating harmful behaviors, etc. People who are just sick of, “Oh, so when I do it, it’s a problem, but when my sister, cousin, mom, co-worker, grandma—[insert whoever] does it, for some reason it’s tolerated?” Why is that, I wonder? People don’t want to deal with the loudest one, so they suppress themselves for the loud ones and displace onto the silent scapegoat.

And scapegoats—we allow it.

This is for those of us who’ve spent a lifetime holding the mirror, only to get blamed for the reflection. For the quiet truth-tellers. The children who grew up parenting everyone’s emotions. The emotional shock absorbers who learned to pick up what everyone else bypasses.

This is the cost of awareness—the tax no one talks about.

My vision for this community I inadvertently started to build is that it’s a home for everyone— the public, clinicians, educators, and to finally breathe into clarity without needing to shout to be heard. Something I myself have felt throughout my life. A place where we don’t confuse silence with safety. Where people can tell the truth without losing their belonging or being exiled. Where integrity is embodied, not just performed for the camera. Much of what I’m seeing in this world is kind of scary. How so many make a living pretending, not actually embodying.

I think of the children’s book Are You My Mother? Where the little bird walks around trying to find his mother. I truly feel the majority of us are that little bird in grown-up bodies, trying to figure out if we’re doing life “the correct way.” Instead of looking for our moms. We are looking for validation, acceptances, and belonging.

Now this becomes problematic, because if we’re all panicked children ( the little birdie) looking for confirmation on how to live, now we have these devices—the algorithm—where people’s “best” selves are posted. This is where the danger lives. Authenticity isn’t rare, it’s just diluted amongst the chaos and noise of those chasing the current to stay relevant within the algorithms. In reality, authencity is there. It’s hard to see when you are locked in to artificial noise. I have spent a lot of hours in my panicked-child state, many times reinforcing the very fawning behaviors I teach clients to let go of. It’s wild work because you have to choose: the discomfort of fawning (the default behavior) or the discomfort of speaking up and naming the behavior many of us get flipped for.

You know, that good ol’ fashioned UNO reverse people pull the minute you bring up an issue, and they instantly become the tone police. Hmm—but when you tone police them, they always have a reason to justify it. I call it getting flipped because now if you call out the pattern, people use role-reversal strategies and guilt to backflip out of accountability. They want to make the rule but don’t want to abide by it the moment their nervous system gets activated ([Porges, 2011]).

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Now let’s zoom out a bit. We all have the capacity to get activated.

All. Of. Us.

It doesn’t matter who you are. The nuance here is that we all get activated at different levels depending on the regulation muscle we’ve built—the one that keeps us from popping off on Trina at Starbucks for getting our order wrong.

Many of us are lost—wandering around as the little birdie trying to find somewhere to belong. Maybe our entire life, we never felt like we could belong in our own families. I found myself growing up becoming the Bounty Quicker Picker Upper for everyone else’s loud spills. The emotional reactivity that goes unchecked and uncontained, the accountability that gets bypassed. It’s frustrating to be in a world where so many get away with having explosive tantrums because of their feelings—meanwhile, there are multiple feelings involved that get unclaimed and abandoned by the one whose feelings take up the most space. I call that controlling the emotional climate ([Bowen, 1978]).

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The re-centering of self—I understand it. It’s a defense, a survival strategy ([Walker, 2013]). But inside family systems, it becomes a cycle: people learn they can use tantrum behavior to control the emotional climate. And when someone names it? Suddenly, they’re the one accused of thinking they’re above it all. That’s never what this work has been about, and I think that’s one of the hardest parts of doing this work—especially what I do with naming patterns that keep us stuck in gridlock and distress. I don’t rock the boat because I think I’m better. I rock it because that’s where comfort has been mistaken for safety, and that includes me. I won’t be hiding in comfort just to keep you comfortable. (Kierkegaard, 1844).

This is something that has impacted me even in my personal life. Everyone loves to have the funny, goofy, fun friend—until that friend has boundaries, tells you no, or doesn’t co-sign your behavior. Then it’s, “You’re therapizing me.” Therapists—how many of you deal with this in your personal life? Now that you’re a clinician, any time you call out a behavior, you get told you’re “therapizing” them? This is a defense strategy I’ve learned many use to avoid accountability by blaming you for treating them like a client. Don’t get me wrong—there are those who do that, just like there are those who attend therapy only to go back home and act morally superior because of it. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about those of us who have always pointed out behavior people refuse to look at.

I am never my job. I am myself.

I feel I’ve been doing this work of studying behavior since I was a child—not by choice, but by survival. Being someone who feels emotions intensely, especially after training my entire life to absorb all the undercurrents of people’s performances—watching them perform while feeling the truth in their undertones, absorbing their lack of accountability, being projected on for family roles I never created, taking the hits from the emotional pollution that comes from those who could care less about self-reflection or how they show up in relationships and environments.

Basically, absorbing the discomfort we all must feel if we ever want to grow out of the toxic habits of being who we are and what keeps us in suffering ([Gilligan, 1982]).

I realize through family work—whether my own or those I work with—that when we are met with the leak in the issue (meaning, finding the culprit pattern causing the friction), there is always one person that sabotages the repair process. It becomes clear they actually benefit from that which they complain about, because in some way they gain something from the dynamic.

Examples:

• A wife who complains about her husband, maybe he cheats, works too much, is a slob. She won’t leave because she will lose the lifestyle.

• A son who’s now married but still flinches at the thought of telling his mother “no.” Not because he doesn’t love his wife or kids, but because he never had to hold a boundary with his mother to stay loved. Avoidance worked before—it kept things calm. But now it’s gridlock. He’s being asked to evolve, to choose differentiation over compliance, and his nervous system reads that as danger, not growth ([Bowen, 1978]).

• Those who chronically complain about their friends’ behavior but never initiate a conversation about it. They overextend, over-accommodate, and then internalize resentment—mistaking avoidance for being emotionally mature. It’s easier to bend and vent than to risk the discomfort of truth-telling ([Festinger, 1957]).

Because if they did have the conversation and the friend responded poorly, they’d have to confront the grief of realizing it might be time to outgrow the relationship. I think this one is true for many of us. We don’t want to leave situations mostly because we’ve gotten comfortable, and leaving would mean having to relocate, outgrow, or spend the energy and time it takes to rebuild. We just don’t want to deal with that. So, this becomes the baseline that many of us float at.

I can hear people now: “Well, not for me…”

Then this is about you, honey.

The whataboutme pollution is next-level too, but that’s for another conversation.

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I noticed the part of me that feels like the little lost bird trying to find belonging has shown up now that I make content with an audience. I notice the current rushing past—everyone posting in a hurry because the algorithm can make you relevant or not, just like that. I noticed the urgency buzz in my nervous system to push out content, almost as if I fell into that current and the pressure to produce kicked in. Feeling like I’m not moving fast enough, but I have a full-time job already and the content I make requires—depth.

Something I see missing in so much of society.

So many of us carry emotional depth like an anchor at the bottom, while others float along the surface—skimming, performing, never daring to swim down and meet us there. And that’s where the loneliness comes from. We live in a world that rewards the floaters and punishes the divers. But as I type this and reflect. How can depth and pressure coexist for long? You can’t force something to be profound while rushing it. Pressure collapses depth. Look around, it turns insight into an algorithmic performance. And rushed energy? It’s half-assed energy, and who likes being on the receiving end of that?

That little birdie energy is what threw me into the current—nothing else. I don’t need to hurry and post a million videos a day, write 15 articles a day. Where is the pressure coming many of us are holding to get married, have kids, settle down.

Settle down to what?

I have 22 years olds in my office having midlife crisis over fear of being behind.

Look around. Much of the what’s out there is just a bunch of dysregulated nervous systems yelling at their phones about their opinions, convinced their perspective is “the right one.”

My portal reveals this because those same mob-mentality behaviors show up on our safari. People assume my work is designed to piss them off because that’s all they see. So that is all they project outward. Even on their relationships.

Notice I said, that’s all they see.

This is where perception became a big, big project to study for me—because perception is truly why I as well as so many others have scars on our own hearts, mostly due to the emotional harm others have caused unintentionally through misperception. As Lisa Feldman Barrett explains, emotions are not read; they are constructed—your brain uses past experiences to guess at what’s happening in the present. So, what we “see” in another person is filtered through our own nervous system’s predictions, not objective truth (Barrett, 2017).

When two people’s predictions clash, it’s not just misunderstanding, it’s biology. We end up defending our constructed reality rather than staying curious about the other’s.(Barrett, 2017).

Here’s what that looks like in real life.
A woman senses her partner pulling away, sees a change in his tone or habits, and her brain predicts he’s cheating. She’s not crazy—her nervous system is scanning for danger using past data. But perception without regulation turns intuition into accusation. (Insert intense music) Now, he feels attacked, she feels unseen, and both are defending their own projections. This is how perception becomes a chess piece we move to avoid accountability. We can conveniently position ourselves as the victim or the morally superior one and stay free from the problem. We must know that freedom is artificial—it’s the silent distress that erodes the nervous system from the inside out.

When you live this way long enough, your body starts to decay under the weight of unspoken anxiety. You start “sweet-lemoning” yourself—telling your body, “It’s fine, I’m fine,” when every cell is screaming that you’re not.

So part of the mission is learning to clean the glass before you call it truth. Because if perception is the lens, emotional literacy is the cloth that cleans that lens.

When we start to talk about “safety” and “feelings” then make it centered around one individual’s safety and feelings, we enter emotional colonizing territory. Because now we’ve been conditioned to believe all we need to do is weaponize guilt and have a tantrum to get people to fall back into their assigned roles of enabling avoidance.

I’ve watched so many couples end their marriages purely because one or both were not willing to hold simultaneous perceptions about the same event—each clinging to their own emotional narrative as absolute truth. As Aaron Beck wrote in Love Is Never Enough (1979), “Most couples are not fighting about what happened. They are fighting about what they think happened.” When we confuse perception with proof, our cognitive distortions become the third partner in the relationship.

Beck called these “automatic thoughts” snap judgments shaped by past experiences that go unquestioned or even bypassed consciously in the heat of emotion. The mind begins building its own courtroom, collecting evidence to prove what it already believes. Those caught in this pattern. Those fumbling under the weight of distorted perception and moral posturing. We are exhausted.

We. Are. Tired.

We Are. Fed Up.

(to be continued in Part II: “The Prey of the World—When Awareness Feels Like Betrayal”)

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Reflection Stop: The Lens Check

Before we rush to defend what we see, pause and ask yourself:

1. When I describe a conflict, do I mostly talk about how I felt—without ever naming what the other person might have been feeling too?
   Sometimes our perception becomes a mirror instead of a window. Overload, burnout, or emotional exhaustion can shrink our field of empathy without us realizing it.

2. Have I been viewing this situation through a single camera angle—mine—without accounting for how someone else’s nervous system might be experiencing the same moment?
   Remember, every nervous system is running its own movie. Their pacing, tone, or withdrawal might not be rejection—it might be regulation.

3. What would it look like to simply name that out loud?
   “Hey, I realize I’ve been talking about how this felt for me, but I haven’t asked how it felt for you.”
   No fixing. No overexplaining. Just naming. Sometimes that one moment of noticing is what reopens the bridge to repair. (remember, it’s human to forget. sometimes when I am caught in my own loops even I can foget to check in with my husband and ask how it felt for him. And Ladies, many of us do this to our partners.)

🧙🏻‍♀️Wizard Cue:
Repair doesn’t start with agreement, it starts with curiosity.

📚 References

• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

• Beck, A. T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. Penguin.

• Bowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aronson.

• Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.

• Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press.

• Kierkegaard, S. (1844). The Concept of Anxiety. Princeton University Press.

• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton.

• Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote.

Extended Reading: Seeing Beyond Your Own Lens

1. Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Barrett dismantles the myth that emotions are fixed, universal reactions. Instead, she explains that our brains constructemotion through prediction—essentially, perception in disguise. This supports your idea that we don’t always see reality; we see our nervous system’s best guess about reality.

2. Beck, A. T. (1979). Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstanding and Restore Trust.Harper & Row.
Beck shows how distorted thinking (“automatic thoughts”) and selective perception create gridlock in relationships. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing that we’re often reacting not to what our partner did, but to what we believethey did—a cornerstone of your “clean the glass before you call it truth” metaphor.

3. Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are.Guilford Press.
Siegel’s concept of “mindsight” (the capacity to perceive one’s own mind and the minds of others) directly underpins emotional literacy. He links reflective awareness to neural integration—essentially, how noticing and naming emotion literally rewires the brain for empathy.

4. Bowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aronson.
Bowen’s theory of differentiation of self supports your point about standing in self-awareness without collapsing into others’ emotional processes. It offers a systems-level framework for understanding how perception gets fused within family emotional climates.

5. Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam Books.
Goleman lays the groundwork for emotional literacy as both an intrapersonal and interpersonal skill, emphasizing that the ability to regulate and read emotional signals determines relational success far more than intellect.

6. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Hyperion.
Kabat-Zinn’s work grounds your “noticing without shame” approach—showing how mindful awareness lets us witness our perceptions and physiological states without collapsing into judgment or defense.

7. Rogers, C. R. (1961). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.
Rogers reminds us that empathy is not about agreement but accurate understanding—“seeing the world as the client sees it.” This mirrors your message that repair begins not with being right, but with being real.