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hey guys heidi preeb here so if you thought that the family roles series was over we would be thinking the same thing however i was publishing the videos this week and i kept feeling like okay there are things that i've left out there are
Heidi Priebe explores whether adults healing from dysfunctional family roles should blame their parents, using a fictional family example to show how generational patterns and parental wounds shape ch
Key Takeaways
- Family roles stem from multi-generational patterns and cannot be explained by blaming a single parent.
- Parents often unconsciously project unacceptable parts of themselves onto children, shaping roles like scapegoat and golden child.
- Children adapt their behavior to keep caregivers regulated, since parental stability is essential to their survival.
- Whether to blame parents depends on one's attachment style and stage of healing; compassion for parents does not mean excusing harm.
- Healing involves recognizing one's own patterns and projections, ideally with professional support.
What the video covers
- Heidi Priebe presents a follow-up to her family roles series, addressing questions left open in earlier videos about where family roles originate and who is to blame for them.
- She argues that dysfunctional family roles cannot be understood by looking at one family or one parent, but must be traced back several generations of inherited patterns, genetics, and hardships.
- She critiques online content that attributes family dysfunction simply to a 'narcissist' or 'toxic' parent, arguing these labels don't explain how such patterns form or how to change them.
- Using a fictional example of Johnny, an abused child who vows to break the cycle, she shows how a parent can unconsciously recreate harm while believing they are being loving.
- Johnny's first child becomes the 'golden child' because she unconsciously learns that showing only happy emotions keeps her father regulated, while his second child, who cries as a colicky baby, is triggered by his unresolved distress and becomes the scapegoat.
- The example illustrates projection: a parent may disown qualities they cannot accept in themselves and assign them to a child, while the child takes on blame and responsibility.
- Priebe explains that children depend on regulated caregivers for survival and will adapt their behavior to secure that caregiving, which shapes roles like hero, scapegoat, or golden child.
- She discusses how attachment style affects whether a person tends to take on blame (avoidant tendencies) or externalize it, and notes that the question of blame changes at different stages of healing.
- She emphasizes that acknowledging a parent's wounds can be compassionate without excusing harm, and that healing typically requires only after the adult is no longer being hurt, often with a therapist or support group.
- The video encourages viewers to recognize their own flaws and projections so they do not repeat the same dynamics with their own children.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Purpose of the Follow-Up
- 01:44Generational Roots of Family Roles
- 03:10Fictional Example: Johnny's Family Story
- 05:30The Golden Child and Parental Regulation
- 08:50The Scapegoat and Projection
- 13:00Blame, Attachment Styles, and Responsibility
- 18:00Healing and Seeking Support
- 21:50Conclusion: Self-Awareness and Breaking Cycles
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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questions that i feel like these videos raise that i don't necessarily answer within the videos maybe no one else feels like that i don't know but i felt like that so i decided that a follow-up video was needed or 10 we'll see where we just
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talk about where these roles come from and also who is to blame for them because i think that anytime we start talking about things like attachment family roles things that are interpersonal wounds this very natural question arises of if
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we want to start healing from these roles or if we want to start healing from our attachment styles do we start immediately placing all of the blame on our parents and expecting them to do the work to get us better and this video is
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an attempt to answer that question as evenly and fairly and compassionately as possible so the thing about family roles is that you can't really look at them without looking a couple of generations back and then a couple of generations
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back from that and then a couple of generations back from that because while we only have direct experience with our own families and maybe one or two generations before us depending on how long your grandparents and great-grandparents were kicking around
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for these roles and the specific dysfunctions that were born into come from a very long line of patterns of behavior of patterns within our genes of patterns within hardships and problems that our families have faced and it's really hard to look at any one
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family and say that one person is to blame for anything so when we were talking about the scapegoat and the golden child in previous videos i felt compelled to expand upon why a parent would ever create a dynamic where one
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child is a scapegoat and one child is a golden child and the reason why i wanted to address this further is because when you look at these family roles online you'll find a lot of videos just simply pinning all of this on the parent being
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a narcissist or the parent being toxic but what do those labels really mean where do they come from and how do we work with them are the natural questions that get raised out of that right because if we believe that toxic people
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and narcissists are just magically falling out of the sky it doesn't really give us much to work with in terms of how to stop that pattern so i'm going to give you a made-up example to kind of help explain how we can't look at these
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instances in isolation okay so let's say you have a little boy named johnny and johnny is two years old and he came into the world like all children do with a pure heart and a desire to do good and to please people and to get
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along happily with his family and his friends like every single baby and every single human who comes into this world he had a very inherent need for love and connection right all babies have that but unfortunately johnny was born into a
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very abusive household so from the time he was one or two years old johnny's dad used to hit him or beat him up when he was crying when he expressed a need for comfort when he wouldn't settle down
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after he'd been fed and it didn't really seem to matter what johnny did or what he tried with his parents if he tried showing his vulnerability and acting really cute and coy or if he tried to act tough and like nothing bothered him
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there was no really reason or rhyme to why he got beat and why he sometimes didn't but like i said johnny came into the world with a very pure intention to connect and love people and be loved by
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people and so the thing that got him through his childhood was this belief that when i grow up i'm going to do better than my parents did for me right i am not going to abuse my children the
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way that my dad abused me i'm going to be loving and patient and kind with my children and i'm going to prove that i can do things differently and i can break this cycle so johnny does all of
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the things that you would expect a good boy to do he goes to school and he tries as hard as he can to focus and get good grades which is hard for him because there's so much chaos at home but he
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does everything he can to make his teachers happy he joins organizations that give him a sense of structure that he doesn't have at home he becomes a boy scout as a child he joins a youth group as a pre-teen and becomes involved in
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the church and he does everything he can think of to try to be a good boy who does right by other people and not turn into the monster that he perceives his dad to be now in high school johnny
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falls in love and he convinces himself i am not going to have a broken home the way my family was broken he asks his girlfriend to marry him when they're both 18 at 22 they welcome their first child and their first child is
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everything that johnny had ever hoped and more so he looks at this child it's a baby girl and he goes i'm going to give this baby girl absolutely everything on earth and anyone who knows johnny would tell you he thinks the sun
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shines out of that baby's ass he really wants to share the workload with his wife he wakes up in the middle of the night time and time again with the baby and as the baby grows up he's really
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eager to put her in all of the best programs give her all of the best opportunities send her to the best school that he's capable of sending her to because he is hell bent on giving this child a better life than the life
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that he had now so far this story sounds pretty benign right it's a happy story it's a redemption story it's a story about a man who is breaking the cycle of abuse in his family and trying to do
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better by his own children but what we don't get is the perspective of the child who grows up with this feeling that they don't quite understand but something tells them my father's mental health and sense of self is resting upon
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me being a good happy kid right because johnny is so fixated on changing his family history and being the father that his father never was the baby starts to notice when i show that i'm happy and smiling and giggling my
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dad responds really well to me but when i show distress when i show anger when i show frustration my dad gets really dysregulated he might not yell at me he might not hit me but he seems stressed and children who are full of mirror
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neurons especially when their babies pick up on that distress in parents right so this baby is being subtly conditioned to only show positive emotion to only act like they're happy and everything's good and everything's fine and they're excelling at preschool
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and they're excelling at kindergarten and they're excelling at grade one and grade two in grade three because they sense that the more they shine and the more that they show to their dad i am having a perfect childhood the more
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regulated their dad stays and we've talked about this before a regulated parent is essential to the survival of a child and children know this without having the language for it and they will naturally do whatever they feel like
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they need to do to get consistent caregiving from their parent which requires a parent who's emotionally stable now let's say johnny and his wife have a second child and by this point johnny is feeling really confident in his abilities as a parent right the
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first child went swimmingly so johnny figures second baby will be a breeze now second baby comes along and this baby is colicky this baby no matter how much he is rocked or soothed or comforted or fed does not stop
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crying so for the first couple of weeks johnny and his wife see different parenting experts they take the baby in for medical tests they confirm that nothing is physically wrong and so they just try everything they can think of to
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try to get the baby to settle but johnny without consciously recognizing it is getting extremely triggered by the baby's distress if he were a perfect father if he were a good responsive attuned father he would know how to
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settle his baby and this thought just gnaws at him and gnaws at him as the baby begins to grow up so he comforts himself by telling himself this baby just has a different temperament than our first baby our first baby i realize
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now was just a good easy baby and this baby just has a different kind of wicked temperament about him but i am a good patient virtuous father so i'm going to do everything within my power to give this second baby all of the same
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opportunities that the first one had so johnny puts the second baby in the same schools the same sports the same programs as the first baby but the second baby isn't quite taking to those activities in fact the second baby has a
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little bit of a rebellious streak and as he grows up he often talks back to johnny and the more he talks back to johnny the more frustrated johnny gets because he's doing everything under the sun to give this baby every opportunity
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he can possibly give him and yet he doesn't seem to appreciate any of it and johnny knows that he's a good father because he gave his first baby all of these opportunities and she is excelling she's getting straight a's she's making
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her teachers and her coaches and her peers proud but this second baby is just a little bit of a bad apple and at this point in the story we might feel really bad for johnny because johnny truly is
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trying with his kids he really wants his second child to have all the same opportunities that his first child had but now let's look at that second child maybe they grow up they're 30 years old sitting in a therapy room
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and they're explaining to their therapist when i was a young child i always felt like when i would show any frustration any anger any unhappiness my dad would get really really out of sorts it seemed to make him incredibly
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distressed when i was distressed and that was scary for me and sometimes my dad would get really angry and he would blow up he would scream he would yell he would ask me why i just couldn't be like my sister and
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then he would tell me i was the reason why he got so angry i was the reason why he lost his temper i was the reason why he threw dishes or threatened to abandon me or hit me and told me it was all for
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my own good and so anyone who's talking to johnny's son as an adult is going to have a pretty negative view of johnny but let's go back to johnny's perspective and see what's happening for him in those moments so when his son
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grows up and starts talking back to him and starts screaming things like i hate you at him as three and four and five-year-olds are want to do johnny might have a ptsd reaction because he's flashing back to his own father
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screaming at him and yelling at him and telling him derogatory things about himself and johnny not realizing that he's now in a completely different situation might completely lose it and scream and rage and yell the same way he
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wanted to as a child but couldn't and because johnny so desperately wants to give his children a different childhood than he had he finds it psychologically intolerable to even think about the fact that he might have some of the anger
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issues that his father had so to justify his outbursts he decides in his own mind that his second child is just ungrateful a bad kid they have problems with authority maybe they have oppositional defiance disorder and he returns to his
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role as a virtuous parent by bringing his child into a psychologist and going please fix him now as an adult johnny's child might want to point the finger at his father and go my father was a narcissist he was toxic he was abusive
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and it's very possible that some of those traits do apply to johnny however johnny was not setting out to terrorize his son he did not wake up in the morning with the intention to make his son's life hell he actually woke up in
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the morning from his perspective with the intention to do the complete opposite of what his parents did now what he didn't realize was that he was accidentally placing a redemption fantasy onto his own children so redemption fantasy is this idea that we
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hold in our heads about a magical future where a perfect harmonious relationship that we have is going to replace all of the pain of our past and johnny really did believe in this story that if he could just give his kids a happy
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childhood then it would be objectively confirmed that he was a good person like he had spent his entire life trying to become so what he accidentally did was create a golden child out of his first child and a scapegoat out of his second
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child all of his good qualities all of the things he wanted to believe about himself that were positive he saw in his first child who was feeding back to him the idea that he was a perfect parent and all of the things that were bad
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about himself that he could not admit to himself as being traits that he possessed like rage and anger and frustration and impatience he just decided were his son's traits and he was simply reacting to his bad no-good son
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now where is the truth right the truth is that johnny has both wonderful intentions and unresolved trauma that hijacks his brain and ends in him abusing his child the same way his dad abused him but denying that it's
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happening and if we were to go back one generation we would find something in johnny's father's history that made the way that he was abusing johnny makes sense to him within his own mind so here's the interesting part about all of
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this to be a cycle breaker in the truest sense of the word you cannot have the intention to never do anything wrong right because that is a redemption fantasy it's looking at this magical future where you will somehow be so good
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that you are not human that you are more christ-like or god-like or your child is more christ-like or god-like than human right breaking the cycle of trauma means being able to look at yourself as having impulses towards kindness and generosity
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and connection and also impulses towards anger and frustration and intolerance and being able to work with yourself in an honest way so let's orient ourselves back in time and space and talk about the family roles so let's say you really
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recognize yourself in the role of the family hero or the role of the scapegoat or the role of the golden child and the natural question that comes up is do i blame my parent and the answer is you could blame your parent but then who
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do they blame their parents i guess right and then their parents well why are they messed up well i guess they have to blame their parents and then we end up going back generations and generations and generations and where does it end right
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we end up blaming adam and eve and then who is their dysfunctional parent right so it's all god's fault it becomes this absolutely ridiculous goose chase trying to figure out where the problem started but i can already hear some of the
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protests at this point of what so we should just forgive our parents so we should just not hold them responsible for any abuse or any mistreatment or any wrongdoings against us that's also not what i'm saying so if we're looking at
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how much blame should we place on the parents there are a couple of questions that i think need to be considered first one what purpose does blaming the parents serve and the answer to this is very important because do we need to
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contextualize our trauma yes absolutely it is not helpful for us to look at the way we turned out and not consider what led us there which biases did our parents have which trauma responses did they inherit that they
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played out on us that shaped us to be the way that we are now we need to understand that otherwise we will take on blame where blame is not due this is especially prevalent for the scapegoat who grew up thinking that they are bad
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they are flawed they are worthless they are scum but not really knowing why they thought that right but it applies to all roles when you start to understand all of that was projections of what my parent couldn't accept was within
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themselves that they placed on to me instead then you become free of that right you can choose to step out of that role and create your own identity so in that sense contextualizing where your trauma came from can be extraordinarily
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helpful however there's a point at which this process stops being helpful and where it stops being helpful is the point at which we decide it is not our responsibility to fix our own trauma because we didn't inflict it on
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ourselves right so if you're expecting your parents to turn around and go oh my god i've seen the error of my ways i'm the reason for all of your problems let me fix it for you you are living in your
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own redemption fantasy and that is keeping you stuck in a cycle of delusion and pain and at this point i want to acknowledge i'm a master's student of psychology i'm not a registered clinician so the advice that i'm giving
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is not clinical advice i highly encourage you to seek out a mental health professional who can help you process these roles and anything that i'm telling you is solely based on what i have learned through my own healing
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process actually that's not true a lot of it is stuff i've read in books but i will reference the books when and where that applies now before we go further i want to acknowledge that it might actually be difficult for you to either
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blame or remove blame from your parent based on your attachment style because if you are avoidantly attached you have a tendency by virtue of the way that your worldview formed before the age of two to take on responsibility for things
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that are not yours so you might truly believe my parent was just punishing me for my own good my parent was a saint my parent did everything right by me i just should have behaved better i shouldn't have acted out it was my fault and every
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punishment they doled out really grew me into a stronger person and this worldview can function to the point of delusion i remember one time having a conversation with a very avoidantly attached person who was explaining to me that their parent was so compassionate
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and so kind that they would never take them or any of their siblings to the doctor when they were really ill because they didn't want to bother the doctor and wasn't that so virtuous of their parent and i was like okay well that was
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child neglect but i will let you work that one out for yourself in therapy so avoidance tend to naturally overtake responsibility and believe that the abuse that happened to them was their own fault and so when they see other
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people complaining about being abused their natural impulse is to go all these people are just playing the victim same thing that happened to them happened to me and i'm fine you might get that attitude in the adult world view of
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johnny's golden child on the other side of things anxiously attached people tend to naturally divide the world into pure evil villains and pure good victims and the reason this happens is because when they were young they were raised in an
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unpredictable environment okay so dad comes home kicks his boots off looks upset some days that means a beating other days it means he's going to wrap them up in a giant bear hug and take them out for ice cream so trying to
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guess what their parent was thinking was almost impossible to do so they didn't bother learning that skill so as an adult it can be difficult still for the anxiously attached person to understand that the way they're feeling is not
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necessarily an accurate representation of what is factually happening in their environment so what that means is there is this belief that negative intent must be behind negative action so if you have an anxiously attached wound it might be
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really difficult for you to try to hold this idea of your parent or your abuser as a complex individual in your mind and that is something that 100 you will need professional help working through and this might also raise the question well
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why should we forgive our abusive parents brilliant psychologists have tackled this question for ages i highly recommend john bradshaw healing the shame that binds you in particular is an excellent excellent book for anyone who is consciously coping with the wounds of
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an abusive parent and that can be any form of abuse whether it's physical emotional sexual psychological and also pete walker the book complex ptsd from surviving to thriving has some incredible resources in it for dealing with the after effects of growing up in
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a dysfunctional family but i believe it's john bradshaw who talks about how rushing to forgive your parents or your abusers can actually be a sign of trying to bypass the work right so i believe it was him who said that you should forgive
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only after you are no longer hurting so your role as an adult is to work with a therapist a support group mental health services to help you resolve and start healing the pain of the family dynamic that you grew up in and i plug this
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almost every video but i'm going to plug it again here adult children of alcoholics is a wonderful free 12-step support group for anyone who's grown up in a dysfunctional dynamic it does not have to be an alcoholic home you could
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have completely sober parents and still attend this support group and it would still cater to you it's a wonderful resource where they talk about the long-term effects of childhood dysfunction and how to show up differently as an adult who's been
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through it so the question of do you forgive your parents becomes a dual part question one where are you at in your healing journey are you just starting to recognize that what happened to you is abuse maybe it's not time to forgive
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maybe it will never be time to forgive for you or maybe down the line you'll start to see both your abuse and your parents abuse and their parents abuse before them and you'll naturally feel more forgiving the dynamics of
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forgiveness or not forgiveness of contact or no contact and all of the intricacies in between are completely personal and they have to be worked out by you in a timeline that works for you right i would never tell anyone forgive
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your abusive parent or don't forgive your abusive parent that is so personal that is so dependent on context and situation and that's something that you and the mental health professional who is helping you have to figure out together what's going to be best for
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your healing but this question of should we blame the parents is such a vital one to ask at any stage of the healing process and at different stages of the healing process is probably going to mean different things to you right at
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one point it might mean contextualizing the situation and going i'm going to look at my parent as both a victim and an abuser in order to understand what happened to them and the sequence of events that led them to abuse that i
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don't want to follow right that's the most important part if we are looking at our parents as all bad and narcissists or villains were going to miss the warning signs that they also missed in ourselves right that was johnny's problem he
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looked at his dad as purely evil so he didn't look at what warning signs might have gone off for my dad where could he have stopped and so he didn't notice those warning signs when they came up for him right
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when we learn what sequence of events led our parents to abuse we can start to recognize that sequence of events if it's happening for us so the end point of this has nothing to do with your parents right we're focusing on you and
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how you can grow and how you can become the best version of yourself and how you cannot pass on the legacy of abuse and understanding that legacy of abuse understanding that intergenerational trauma understanding what it was that caused all of these people who came
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before you and your family to act a certain way can really help you understand how not to perpetuate it right because delusional fantasies about being a good person all of the time do not work they just do not we are all people with
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tempers with flaws with challenges with things that make us angry and irrational and upset and if we are unwilling to look at those things within ourselves and notice when they're coming up for us and when we're in the danger zone of
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repeating that cycle of trauma we absolutely cannot fix it inside of all of us is a desire to do good and be virtuous and also a desire to act out in anger and fear when we feel threatened an awareness of both helps us to nurture
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the one that we want to nurture which is the stable rational part of ourselves who sees even ourselves as both good and bad and is having the opportunity in every moment to choose which impulse to act on i feel like i got off topic in
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this but i don't think i did i think that all ties back in the point i'm trying to make here is that when we put all of the blame on someone else what we're often doing is putting ourselves in pure victim mode
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and the other person in pure abuser mode and well that can be a helpful step for sure in the healing process there also is a very um dry unemotional sequence of events that we can access to help us understand how
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trauma's gotten passed down intergenerationally and if we aren't taking the time to understand that and to understand that all abusers are usually in some form victims of some other trauma themselves then we don't know how to stop the cycle like we don't
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have the information we need right so i'm not telling you don't blame your parents i'm not telling you don't get mad about your abuse but what i'm saying is we should contextualize the parents and we should use that information to
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contextualize ourselves and our own responses and our own impulses because that context allows us to be accurate in our thinking and only accurate thinkers are going to be able to break the cycles otherwise we're all just johnny right
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allowing our well-intentioned idealism to perpetuate a cycle of trauma and abuse okay that's all i have for today this was an inflammatory subject probably so if there's anything that you want clarification on in terms of what i was
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implying please let me know i feel like this video is going to be easy to misinterpret but maybe i'm wrong let me know your thoughts in the comments i will provide lots of resources for anyone who has been through
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dysfunctional family abuse in any form because this is a very serious topic and if you've been through this you absolutely need help no exceptions i don't care who you are i don't care how mentally strong you think you are you
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need help to overcome interpersonal trauma that's just how it works all right i love you guys i hope you're taking care of yourselves and i will see you back here soon [Music]
Topics:family rolesscapegoatgolden childnarcissistic parentattachment stylesintergenerational traumaprojectionemotional regulationfamily dysfunctionhealing
