What Are The Dysfunctional Family Roles

Heidi Priebe introduces the dysfunctional family roles system, based on Virginia Satir's family therapy work, and previews six roles: hero, scapegoat, lost child, mascot, caretaker, and golden child.

Key Takeaways

Dysfunctional family roles are adapted behaviors children learn to secure needs, not their authentic selves
Parents usually assign roles unconsciously based on what the family system is missing
A family is dysfunctional in this framework whenever it serves the parent's needs over the children's, regardless of addiction
Many adults keep these roles unconsciously well into adulthood, and therapy can help them move toward their authentic selves

What the video covers

Introduces the 'dysfunctional family roles' system, which explains adapted selves rather than being a formal personality test
Distinguishes the authentic self from the adapted self, which is shaped by social conditioning from early childhood
Attributes the framework to Virginia Satir, the founder of family therapy, who viewed families as interconnected systems
Explains that children are often assigned roles based on what the family system lacks, usually unconsciously by parents
Describes how parents reinforce roles through subtle reward and punishment systems
Defines a dysfunctional family as one that prioritizes the parent's emotional needs over the children's, not only families with addiction
Lists causes of dysfunction including addiction, untreated mental illness, unresolved trauma, attachment issues, and workaholism or religious addiction
Notes that roles become internalized identity, often persisting into adulthood without awareness
Previews six common roles: family hero, scapegoat, lost child, mascot, caretaker/enabler, and golden child
Announces a forthcoming series linking these roles to attachment styles

Chapters

Who originally identified the dysfunctional family roles?

Virginia Satir, known as the mother of family therapy, first identified these roles while studying how families function as systems. She focused on homes with alcoholic or addicted parents before the model expanded to other forms of dysfunction.

Does a family have to have an alcoholic parent to be considered dysfunctional in this system?

No. Any family where the unit primarily serves a parent's emotional needs rather than the children's can be dysfunctional. Causes can include untreated mental illness, unresolved trauma, attachment issues, or addictions to things like work, shopping, or religion.

Do children choose these family roles?

No. According to Priebe, parents unconsciously assign roles at birth based on what the family is missing, then reinforce them through rewards and punishments. Children internalize these roles as part of their identity without realizing they are adapted behaviors.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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hey guys heidi preeb here today i wanted to introduce a system that if you're following me on any other social media platforms so facebook twitter instagram uh medium you will already have heard me talking about this system but i also wanted to

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give a quick introduction to it on youtube because i want to explore the system more through a series of videos so this system is called dysfunctional family roles it's not technically a personality system but it is a system

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that explains a lot about our personalities and what roles we take on as we go through our lives so for all intents and purposes i'm going to kind of group it in with personality systems but what this particular system really

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plays on is your adapted self so family therapists often talk about the authentic self versus the adapted self so your true self is the person that you are underneath all of your social conditioning and there is a large

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philosophical debate we could have about what the authentic self is you could argue that there is no true core self that at our essence we're all just kind of channeling consciousness and awareness but the point is we can all

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agree that there is definitely something called an adapted self which is the traits that we learn to display and the roles that we learn to take on in our social environment in order to fit in and get our needs met and we start

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learning to do this at a very very young age so from the time you are a toddler you are learning kind of through classical conditioning but then eventually we internalize a lot of these lessons that we learn how to show up in the world and how to

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ask for love attention connection in a way that is most likely to give you what you want in return so the very first instance of this is a baby crying right and learning that this gets my caregiver's attention so when i need

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something this is how i'm going to ask for it and then as we grow up these roles become more and more complex when you're five years old you can't just cry the same way a baby would cry and have

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your needs met you're expected to use your words but at the age of five just as at the age of two and at the age of 17 a lot of us learn that certain words certain ways that we show up certain

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ways that we ask for things of other people get us what we want more effectively than other things and which strategies work for us highly depends on what kind of family we grew up in so the social roles that we're going to be

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talking about today were originally identified by virginia satir who was the mother of family therapy she was the first person to go really really deep into how a family functions like a system and how each individual member and what they bring to the family

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impacts the whole and how that hole in return impacts each individual member which is just kind of a fancy way of saying families are complex ecosystems that are made up of many different people and sometimes when a child is

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born they are assigned a role by the family based on what is missing from the existing family unit and this is almost never conscious on behalf of the parent right they don't decide that this is who they want to classically condition their

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child to become in some cases maybe to an extent that's at play but for the most part through a subtle reward and punishment system the parent conditions the child to behave in certain ways based on what the family needs at the

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time of the child's birth now of course it's kind of unavoidable that this will happen who we are is shaped by the people that raise us the home environment that we're raised in and that's not always a bad thing but

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virginia satire originally began looking at homes that include an alcoholic or an addicted parent and this model eventually expanded to include any sort of family dysfunction so if you see yourself in any of these roles but you don't have an alcoholic or addicted

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parent that doesn't necessarily disqualify you any family in which the family unit is operating to serve the needs of a parent more so than the needs of the children is qualified as a dysfunctional family in this system and

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there are a lot of different reasons why a family might function that way one could be that one or both of the parents are alcoholics or addicts but another reason could be that one or both parents have untreated mental illnesses one or

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both parents have unresolved attachment issues that they're projecting onto their child one or both parents has trauma that they have not healed from or found proper coping strategies to deal with one or both parents could have an addiction to something that we perceive

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to be benign but that they are putting above their child at every opportunity so examples of this might be parents who have work addictions parents who have shopping addictions john bradshaw and alice miller who are two of the most

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influential psychologists in the family therapy space talk a lot about religious addiction in parents so parents who put their religious beliefs or their religious doctrines above the needs of their children would qualify as a dysfunctional family in this system so

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any family unit that is operating not primarily to meet the needs of the children both physically and emotionally but that is primarily concerned with meeting the emotional needs of the parent is considered a dysfunctional family and the following roles are

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likely to show up among the children over the years a whole bunch of different psychologists have contributed to dysfunctional family roles so you can find anywhere up to like 20 or 30 different roles out there and all of

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them play important parts and it's really worth exploring but today i want to focus on the six most commonly occurring family roles so the ones that you see over and over and over again regardless of whose book you're reading

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or whose theory you're looking at over the next couple weeks i'm going to do a deep dive into the different attachment styles and which family roles they tend to take on but i wanted to make this video to just quickly introduce the

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different roles so that we're all on the same page about what this system is before we get started so again children don't choose these roles parents unconsciously choose these roles for the children at the time of their birth and

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then subtly reinforce the role through what they reward and what they punish over the course of the child's life now at a certain point in the child's life for most children their role becomes a part of their identity so they don't

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know that they're doing these things or playing out these characteristics because they're getting punished or rewarded for it they start to think this is just who i am this is just what i do this is a part of my identity and

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because these roles become internalized children carry them on throughout their life well into their own adulthood without ever realizing that these are their adapted selves it's not necessarily their true wants and needs and emotions it is who they had to

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become in order to fit the needs of their family system so some children get to adulthood and realize this role doesn't fit me so much anymore maybe it never really felt like it fit me and maybe with the help of a

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therapist they learn to abandon that role and move more fully into who they truly are but a lot of us unconsciously cater to these roles our entire lives and we're going to talk a lot more about what that looks like as the week goes on

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the roles we're going to talk about today are the roles of the family hero the family scapegoat the lost child the mascot the caretaker or the enabler and the golden child i'm just going to give you a very brief overview today but

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we're going to go much more deeply into the main roles in the future so the hero like any of the other dysfunctional roles has a secret mission that they've been tasked with at birth and this mission is never overtly stated but

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based on what their parents praise them for and what they reject them for they learn what their mission is and the mission of the family hero is to convince outsiders that they are a nice normal family and the family hero does

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this by being very achievement oriented and excelling in some area that the family system really values so these children tend to become very perfectionistic they tend to obsess over making a mistake and feel extreme guilt if they do make a mistake they may be

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highly motivated in academics if that's what the family values or they may be highly motivated in sports if that's what the family values or they may be devoutly religious if that's what the family values whatever it is that the

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child perceives is going to make the family look very good from the outside they become extremely adept at so the family hero helps out the family by showing everyone who's watching look at what a success i am look at what a nice

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normal well-adjusted kid i am there couldn't possibly be any dysfunction in my family because i turned out so great and this is the role that they subtly carry on into adulthood so even as they grow up the family hero often feels an

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immense pressure to perform to do very well at everything that they take on and to not show any weakness or vulnerability to the world they don't want to invite any suspicion that something might be going wrong inside of

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the family unit and the family hero role often correlates with avoidant attachment which we're going to talk a lot more about over the next couple weeks the next family role is the role of the family scapegoat so the secret

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mission of the family scapegoat is to be blamed for everything that goes wrong in the family so from a very young age the parents often project their own negative qualities onto the scapegoated child so that they don't have to look at the

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faults within themselves so let's say mommy or daddy has really bad rage issues they'll pick one child to direct the majority of those rage issues onto and then tell the child mommy your daddy gets angry because you're a bad kid in

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the addicted family it might be mommy or daddy drinks or uses because you're a bad kid because you stress us out so much and this is very confusing for the young child because suddenly they're only getting reinforced for their bad

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behavior they get a lot of attention even though it's negative attention when they're behaving badly when they're acting out when they're being blamed for something and they scream back and start a fight that's when they actually get the most focused attention on them so

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they are being subtly conditioned to behave badly in order to get attention from their parents and because children are very intuitive creatures they usually can't put words to it but they can pick up on the fact that mommy or

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daddy feels a little bit relieved after they yell mommy or daddy feels a little bit better once they've blamed the child for being bad so this child will take on being bad being a bad kid being a rotten

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egg as their identity and this will often follow them through life and they will continuously act out continuously seek out relationships where they are being blamed shamed told that they are at fault for someone's behavior because this belief gets internalized in the

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scapegoated child that they are bad and they are the reason other people have problems so very often the scapegoated child has a fearful avoidant attachment style it's a very disorienting experience to be scapegoated because there isn't really a way to predict

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what's going to elicit anger from your caregiver because it doesn't actually follow any rhyme or reason in relation to your behavior but you don't know that if you're the scapegoat so a lot of scapegoats also develop symptoms of

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complex ptsd because they had a very unstable and in some cases unpredictably dangerous early home environment and this is something that we're going to talk more about later this week when we talk about the fearful avoidance style and scapegoat role the third common

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family role is the role of the lost child so the lost child learned to kind of survive in their family environment by keeping their head down and pretending that nothing was going wrong they may have noticed that when their

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siblings acted out or spoke their mind they were punished or rejected or blamed and so the lost child tries to adapt to the family unit by becoming whatever the family unit wants and this doesn't really allow the lost child to develop a

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sense of identity for themselves that they're able to confidently assert and communicate and this feeling of identity incompletion follows the lost child into adulthood so this often correlates with an anxious attachment style in which the lost child when they grow up is

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continuously searching for another person to kind of complete them and give them the guidance that they feel like they never really got as a child so the lost child may really struggle to trust themselves and know what's best for them

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even as an adult and they may unconsciously spend the majority of their lives seeking out a partner that really functions as more of a caregiver for them because they never really learned who they were what they stood for or what they had to give back to the

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world they're constantly looking for someone else to tell them or to help them realize that and we're going to talk a lot more about this later on in the week when we talk about the anxious attachment style and the lost child role

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so at this point i want to highlight that you can have more than one family role so the three roles that we're going to talk about next are sometimes secondary roles you might have a child who is the scapegoat but also has a

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secondary role as the mascot you can also have shifting roles so you might have a child who is subtly reinforced to one behavior at one point in time and then a different behavior later on based on the needs of the family system at the

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time so the family system roles can change when one child goes away to college when there's some sort of major upset in the family there are a lot of different things that can impact these roles but most children have one

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dominant role one role that follows them throughout the majority of their family life and then maybe a couple of secondary roles that they shift through depending on the needs of the family unit at the time so the third family

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role we're going to talk about is the role of the mascot the mascot is the child who is constantly on high alert for conflict that might arise in the family and the mascot attempts to diffuse this conflict through humor so

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they might actually present as a very easy-going laid-back fun-loving personality but under the surface they are governed by a consistent sense of anxiety because they are always on the lookout for conflict bubbling up in the family unit because they believe that it

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is their job to diffuse that conflict through humor and this is likely going to be the way that this child deals with conflict all the way through to adulthood so in their adult relationships in their relationships with their own children they might

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really struggle to take emotions and feelings seriously because they learn to disconnect from their own emotions in favor of lightening the mood and keeping things on the surface where it felt safe the next rule is the role of the

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caretaker or the enabler now this might be the spouse of someone who is addicted or it might be one of the children who has kind of stepped up to take a more parental role within the family so you

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often see this with an older child who has younger siblings in the family system who they kind of step up and become a little bit of a parental figure for if the actual parental figures in the family are not capable of fulfilling

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that role and this doesn't just mean meeting the physical needs of their younger siblings more likely it means meeting their emotional needs so the caretaker's role is to make sure that any messes that get created within the family system are cleaned up and if the

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parent is not going to clean them up the child who takes on the caretaker role will so if one of the parents is an alcoholic this child might make excuses for them as to why they're not showing up places if one of the parents is

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scapegoating one of the children the caretaker might step in to provide guidance and emotional support for that younger child the caretaker might be taking care of their younger siblings or the parent or both so there's often a role reversal in

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the case of the caretaker where they're actually acting as a bit of a parent figure for their own parent and this is often a role that follows children well into adulthood they are at high risk of developing highly co-dependent

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relationships where they constantly feel as though they need to take responsibility for cleaning up other people's messes for making sure that everyone else is emotionally taken care of and the tricky thing about this role is that the caretaker believes they're

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doing the family a service by cleaning up the messes but what they're actually doing is enabling the family dysfunction because if there is never anything to call attention to the outside world that the family unit is in trouble help will

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never arrive so the caretaker believes that they're keeping their family together and they're keeping their family unit strong and while it is true that they're probably keeping them together they're also lessening the likelihood that someone on the outside

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is going to notice the dysfunction that's happening within the family and get the children in that family the support and care that they need and of course the child does not know their enabling right that is far beyond the

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scope of what children are capable of understanding it's far beyond the scope of what a lot of adults are capable of understanding right but this is the accidental role that the caretaker fulfills in the family is the role of

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the enabler of the dysfunction the final family role that we're going to talk about is the role of the golden child the golden child is kind of the inverse dynamic of the scapegoat so the scapegoated child is the child who the

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parent projects all of their own negative qualities onto so that they don't have to take responsibility for them the golden child is the child who the parent projects all of their positive characteristics onto so this child is often blatantly favored by the

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parent they may not say so but it's often evident to everyone in the family that this is the favorite child and with this comes a sense of kind of importance and heightened esteem for the golden child but it also comes with a complete

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erasure of their personality so the golden child learns that i will be given special treatment and special care by my parents if i become exactly who they want me to be now this is not dissimilar from the hero whose personality is kind

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of erased in favor of being achievement oriented the golden child is a little bit different in that the role they're trying to fulfill is the role of a kind of mini version of their parent so if the parent is devoutly religious the

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golden child might also become devoutly religious on the flip side if the parent is incredibly irresponsible this child might mimic that parent's behavior and make them feel like hey it's cool it's all fun that we're behaving like this

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the golden child's role is to make the parent feel like they are okay in their own dysfunction because they're raising a child who's similar to them and the child is fine so it validates whatever the parent's existing worldview is now

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the golden child might seem like an attractive role on the surface it might be very very envied by the other siblings however the golden child gets treated like an adult in a way that is really developmentally inappropriate so

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they may be victims of what psychologists call emotional incest which is not to be confused with sexual abuse but emotional incest is when the parent treats the child more like a spouse than like a child so they might

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confide in them in a way that is not appropriate for the child to be confided in at the age that they're at they might look at the child as a way to regulate themselves so let's say we have a parent

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with emotional regulation issues they might see their child as the answer to their feelings of need or desperation maybe this is a parent who had a child because they believed finally someone will love and respect me unconditionally if i have a child and it puts an immense

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pressure on the child to fulfill the emotional needs of the immature adult the golden child might also be enlisted in bullying their siblings alongside the parent which can be very traumatic for the golden child they often grow up with

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a very deep kind of repressed but nonetheless present and intense feeling of guilt and remorse because they're aware that they were treated very differently from their siblings but they don't know why and there are a lot of mental justification they'll often make

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but deep down they'll feel this sense of something was wrong now with the golden child they can also suffer a fall from grace so if the golden child at some point in their life does something that violates the parent's moral code or that

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makes the parent feel like oh you're not serving as a good projection of my positive qualities they might then become the scapegoated child for example let's say you have a child who is raised in a very devoutly religious home who

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then who later comes out as gay the parent might switch from projecting all of their positive characteristics onto the child to projecting only negative characteristics onto the child and believing now i am unhappy because you have brought shame or whatever it is

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onto the family and then the golden child will have a complete role reversal which is extraordinarily disorienting regardless of the age at which this happens so none of the dysfunctional family roles are good by definition they all exist to

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compensate for something that the caregiver is not able to provide to the child and over the next couple weeks we're going to talk more about how this relates to attachment styles because attachment styles like family roles are part of your adapted self so they are

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the characteristics that you take on in order to survive as best as possible within the family unit that you were born into and if you recognize yourself in any of these roles i really really recommend talking about it to a

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therapist or counselor if you're able to there are also some really good resources that you can use to read about these roles i will link in the description of this video but for now i just wanted to offer a brief

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introduction and we will continue to dive deeper into these and talk about what to do if you find yourself in any of these roles alright if you have any questions please leave them in the comments i will try to clarify what i

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can and i hope that you guys are taking care of yourselves i love you and i will see you next time [Music] you

Topics:dysfunctional family rolesfamily therapyVirginia Satiradapted selffamily heroscapegoatlost childgolden childcodependencyattachment styles

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