An Introduction to Dysfunctional Family Roles
Hello and welcome back to my Medium channel (do they call Medium pages channels? I actually have no idea. I barely ever write anymore but felt oddly compelled to today).
If you have been hanging around my twitter lately, you may have heard me passively reference the latest personality system that I have become obsessed with: Dysfunctional Family Roles. After going down a delightful virtual rabbit hole categorizing the ‘This Is Us’ children into their respective archetypes, I realized it may behoove me to write a quick piece explaining what the fuck I am talking about.
So here we go! Let’s talk about family roles!
A few questions I assume you may have:
- What are dysfunctional family roles and where did they come from?
Great Q! The first person to talk about family roles was Virgina Satir, the Godmother of Family Therapy. She realized that in alcoholic or addicted families, children began to adopt specific personas or play specific roles to compensate for and distract from their parents’ addictions.
There was actually this whole movement in the 80s where psychologists began studying the makeup of families that included an alcoholic parent and the research spread like wildfire. The term ‘Adult Children of Alcoholics’ was coined to describe the archetype of someone who grew up in an alcoholic home.
Adult Children of Alcoholics or ‘ACOA’s struggled with a plethora of problems including:
- Impulsivity
- Struggling to see projects through to completion
- Challenges in forming and maintaining intimate relationships
- Trouble adjusting to external changes
- Being either hyper- or hypo- responsible
- Experiencing a general and pervasive sense of self-loathing
And a whole host of other debilitating issues, which you can read about here.
Now. Did you find yourself relating to that list, despite not having an alcoholic parent? You’re not alone!
As the ‘ACOA’ profile grew in popularity, therapists started realizing that a ton of their clients whose parents were not alcoholics or addicts nonetheless fit almost every characteristic. From that point onward, the term ‘Adult Child’ was used to refer to people who grew up not just in alcoholic homes, but in dysfunctional ones.
Of COURSE the term ‘dysfunctional’ can mean many things and is wildly open to interpretation. For the sake of simplifying things, I will reference the definition used in the book ‘The Narcissistic Family’ by Robert M. Pressman and Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, which describes an unhealthy family system as one that operates around meeting the parents’ needs rather than the children's.
So basically, homes where the parents (unconsciously or consciously) had kids as means of bolstering their own ego.
Maybe one or both parents suffered abuse in their own childhood and saw starting a family as a way of finally reversing the power dynamic they grew up with. Maybe one or both parents thought that having a child meant someone would finally love them unconditionally. Maybe one or both parents saw their children as an extension of themselves, rather than as independent people with their own needs, wants and aspirations.
Whatever the case may be, countless children ended up adopting one of the six plus ‘family roles’ that are characteristic of dysfunctional families. These roles have been adapted, changed and expanded upon by countless psychologists over the years (notably Claudia Black and Sharon Wegscheider Cruse who built upon Satir’s original theory). But over time, five or six of the roles have remained more or less constant. Those are the ones we’ll go over today.
Anyway! Are you bored of the history yet? That’s fair. Same. Let’s get to your second inevitable question:
2. What are the specific roles and which one am I?
The six most commonly agreed upon roles are called Hero, Scapegoat, Lost Child, Mascot, Caretaker/Enabler and Golden Child.
The roles can shift over the family’s lifespan. One child can also take on more than one role, depending on what the family environment demands of them. However, most children fall into one predominant role, which sticks to them like glue as they grow up — because unconsciously, their personality forms around the role they’ve been assigned.
Each child has a specific ‘job’ in the family. The jobs are not explicitly stated, nor are they consciously assigned by the parents. Rather, they are reinforced through a subtle reward and punishment system that takes place over the duration of the child’s upbringing. They are not offered specific roles so much as they are forced into them.
So let’s talk about what each role looks like.
The Hero
The ‘job’ of the Family Hero is to make the family look well-adjusted and normal on the surface.
This child tends to become a compulsive over-achiever; excelling through sports, academics or any other area that may bring pride unto the family.
Their unconscious mission of the Hero is to make outside observers think, ‘That child MUST come from a good, well-adjusted family! After all, they’re so successful!’ This is an immense burden to bear, but one that the Hero adopts completely unconsciously.
And indeed, this child often denies the imperfections of their family, even to themselves. Focusing on outside achievements is an excellent way of keeping the mind occupied and distracted from the dysfunction going on at home.
However, the pressure of this role can cause the Hero to become overly-responsible and perfectionistic — causing problems that begin in childhood but radiate into adulthood. They may berate themselves for tiny mistakes and experience a deep-seated fear of appearing as anything less than perfect in the eyes of others. This can lead to struggles with anxiety and addiction down the line, as the Hero tries harder and harder to maintain their ‘perfect’ image — never reaching out for help or support from others, as this was never an option for them in early life.
May correlate with: Enneagram 3, Enneagram 1
The Scapegoat
The ‘job’ of the Scapegoat is to be the family ‘problem child.’
This child tends to be the one who most clearly sees the family dysfunction for what it is, and is prone to speaking up about it. To rectify this threat to the family image, the other members unconsciously begin thinking of the scapegoat as crazy or unwell. The family may then berate, abuse or take their anger out on the scapegoat until their perceived ‘unwell’ status becomes real.
The Scapegoat is often referred to as the family’s ‘Identified Patient.’ The parents may regularly take them in for psychological testing or treatment, believing that if only this one child would behave, the family would at last know peace. In this way, the Scapegoated child unconsciously protects the family image by taking on the blame for the dysfunction of the entire unit.
In reality, the Scapegoated child’s acting out is a product of lifelong gaslighting. Being told they’re a ‘bad’ kid since birth, the Scapegoat tends to take on a deeply negative self-image and may become extremely self-destructive as their life goes on. Again and again, they act out as the ‘bad kid’ they have been told they are. Many scapegoated children go on to develop symptoms of complex post traumatic stress-disorder, as their sense of self becomes deeply disturbed by their family’s frequent villainization of them.
To read more about family scapegoat abuse, I recommend this book.
May correlate with: Enneagram 8, Enneagram 6
The Lost Child
The Lost Child’s role is to keep their head down and act as if nothing of significance is going wrong.
Overwhelmed, under-resourced and generally unconfident about their ability to thrive on their own, this child learns that keeping quiet and refusing to make waves is the best way to survive the dysfunction of their family unit.
The ‘job’ of this child is to not pose as a problem in any way. They may be sweet, unassuming and compliant on the surface — developing people-pleasing skills that will follow them well into adulthood. But under the surface they feel uncertain, disempowered and desperate for parental guidance.
The Lost Child tends to spend a great deal of time alone and they may frequently dissociate into fantasy. Lacking good communication skills and a strong sense of who they are, the Lost Child may struggle to assert themselves as their life goes on.
Even as an adult, the Lost Child may survive on dissociated fantasies of meeting their ‘soulmate’ and become preoccupied with finding someone to complete them — rather than developing and asserting their own unique identity, which they never had the chance to form within their family unit.
May correlate with: Enneagram 9, Enneagram 4
The Mascot
The Mascot’s ‘job’ is to relieve family tension through humor and positivity.
Seeming upbeat, jovial and good-natured on the surface, the mascot child understands that if something can be made light of, it’s unlikely to upset anyone too deeply. Therefore, if their family dynamic can be made light of, the underlying tensions that are inherent to it can remain where the parents believe they belong — under the surface.
Although they seem relaxed and laid-back, the family Mascot is actually on high alert at all times, looking for a situation that may need diffusing. Lacking the skills to navigate real conflict, this child attempts to side-step it by drawing the attention away from it and making people laugh. Their upbeat nature is actually underscored by a pervasive sense of anxiety.
In adulthood, the Mascot may struggle to have serious conversations about emotions and continue to deflect from pain with humor and good-naturedness. This tendency may be appreciated by others but may also keep the Mascot’s relationships relatively shallow and one-dimensional as they fear the deeper self-disclosure that intimate relationships require of them.
May correlate with: Enneagram 7
The Caretaker/Enabler
This child’s ‘job’ is that of a ‘mini parent’ — they may step in to take care of the parent themselves or to serve as a surrogate parental figure for their younger siblings.
The Caretaker believes that they are doing the family a great service by cleaning up their parent’s messes. They may soothe emotions after a blow-up, remind the grown-ups to pay their bills on time or become deeply attuned to the needs of everyone in the unit, serving as an overall peacemaker and diplomat.
While this behavior does keep the family running smoothly on the surface, it also enables the unhealthy behavior of the parents who are in some way failing to cater to the physical or emotional needs of their children.
Well into adulthood, the Caretaker may unconsciously surround themselves with people who suffer from mental illness or addiction. Overextending themselves in the name of helping others is second nature, because their nervous system is wired to believe that smoothing over conflict will guarantee their survival. Their adult relationships — as well as their relationships with their own children — may take on a deeply codependent nature.
May correlate with: Enneagram 2
The Golden Child
In the case of the Scapegoat, the parent projects all of their own negative qualities onto the child. In the case of the Golden Child, the parent projects all of their positive qualities.
At a first glance, this may seem like a positive thing. The Golden Child is unabashedly their parent’s ‘favorite’ and they may grow up feeling special, important and chosen. However, there is a sinister undertone to this role.
The Golden Child’s ‘job’ is to adopt and live out the parent’s moral code. The parent may unconsciously see this child as a ‘mini spouse’ and confide in them to an inappropriate extent — subtly relying on them for emotional support. This is known as emotional incest.
The Golden Child often grows up driven by guilt — in part because they feel responsible for their parent’s emotions and in part because they are, on some level, aware of the fact that they have escaped the more overt forms of abuse that one or more of their siblings faced.
The Golden Child may be enlisted to side with the parent in bullying or abusing the Scapegoat — believing their actions to be justified on the surface but nonetheless suffering the effects of second-hand trauma.
The Golden Child may also experience a ‘fall from grace’ at some point in their lives — a point at which the parent who has always idealized them suddenly knocks them off their pedestal. This may be due to the Golden Child ‘violating’ one of the morals their parent has imposed onto them. The Golden Child may then become the Scapegoated Child.
May correlate with the Enneagram type of the Narcissistic Parent
Yikes! So! What do we do if we recognize ourselves in one or more of these roles?
We go easy on ourselves.
We develop compassion for the innocent children we were before our roles were chosen for us and we seek to reclaim the parts of ourselves that have been lost along the way.
Working with a counsellor who is well-versed in dysfunctional family roles can serve as an excellent jump-start to the healing process. As can checking out the following books:
Bradshaw On: The Family by John Bradshaw
Rejected, Shamed and Blamed: Help and Hope for Adults In The Scapegoat Role by Rebecca C. Mandeville
Adult Children: Secrets of Dysfunctional Families by John Friel and Linda D. Friel
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson
Complex PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving by Pete Walker
The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman and Robert M. Pressman
