Every home is a theater. Every family has its roles to cast. Even with no outside director, positions must be filled, characters assigned. We are all auditioning in each moment of early life. Someone must “wear the pants” in the family, whether he or she wears a dress, a suit, or shorts. The ensemble requires a caretaker, not necessarily the adult variety. In dysfunctional homes one role is the most challenging: the person who recognizes the dysfunction for what it is.

You don’t get paid for taking this part, except in tears; nor will your fellow cast members applaud. Indeed, you become the clan’s scapegoat, the one who takes on most of the blame for the whirling, muddy mess of life at home. The part can kill you or liberate you, or both. One thing for sure: you will need strength and endurance.

The job of portraying “the bad one” doesn’t always demand that you do any major wrong. A fine student and a good citizen can fit the slot so long as he is not what a parent was hoping for. Were you supposed to be a boy, but turned out a girl? Are you artistic when an athlete was expected? Were you required to be forever devoted, but began having ideas of your own, a life of your own? Do you bear a resemblance to someone a parent disliked? Perhaps the elder is jealous of your beauty, intelligence, or his spouse’s affection for you. Maybe the issue comes down to knowing too much for the comfort of others.

Your character’s script gives voice to pained pleadings for the guardian’s approval, but allows only inconsistent success, at best. The parental judge is not impartial. Brothers and sisters, better treated than you, won’t acknowledge the truth in your complaints. Perhaps the other parent instructs you not to upset his spouse, as if you own more power than you do, as if the trouble is your fault and not his.

The odd man out attempts to find a regular ally. No takers, I’m afraid. This job would not only put him in the crosshairs, but worse. He’d have to know the family for what it is, share the psychic pain of realizing its truth is false; its court unjust, with no hope of appeal.

Sides must be picked, teams chosen. You might have a single ally only on occasion, but not anyone with the courage and insight to make common cause with you and speak truth to power.

A kind of brainwashing occurred in your home. The family “drank the Kool-Aid” or breathed in the air of the household delusion. They are blinded to the truth, as you are not.

The one who is immune to the family’s warped vision is dangerous. What might happen if everyone recognizes the reality of the home dysfunction? No, this can’t be permitted. The play would fail, the audience depart. The odd man out must be crushed.

Such a person is likely to become the “identified patient (IP)” of the family, the one who is “wrong,” the one with the problem. He may be depressed, angry, rebellious or all of these.  The IP can lose years, decades to the stamp of imperfection emblazoned on his personality. A lifetime is not long enough for such a one to find approval on this morally bankrupt stage. If, however, he enters treatment he might grieve the undeserved contempt that is his lot. Now, finally, he escapes from home psychologically, perhaps physically.

The family condemns him for betrayal, of course. Disloyalty is added to his list of transgressions and if guilt can be induced he will return to them for more of the same life: more of the same mistreatment. His role in the play resembles Sisyphus, the mythological character who was assigned the punishment of pushing a huge boulder up a hill until it rolled back down; up and down, never reaching the top, for all his days.

The identified patient can be drawn to a mate who also rejects and ridicules him, persuading their children our hero is the problem. Thus, we reach the second act of the performance, where the lead character enacts a new version of the torture, one he has chosen, unconsciously replicating his early misfortune. Perhaps he resembles Tantalus in his futile, unending search for that which is unreachable. Despite knowledge of the familial corruption, he cannot resist the temptation, the desire for proper acknowledgement. The Greek myth tells us Tantalus stood in a pool, forever hungry, forever thirsty. Bending, the water receded, leaving him parched. Reaching for fruit from a branch just above, the nutrition raised itself and could not be grasped. He was “tantalized.”

Do not lose heart. With sufficient courage and time in treatment our protagonist can become the healthiest person in the clan. The rest, you understand, continue bumping into many of life’s obstacles, the parts to which they are blinded. They too play a role assigned in childhood. They do not know themselves well, since this would require seeing the family as it is, not the imagined world of pretend functionality that was the first lie taught at home.

Terrible choices? Yes. Victims all, but in different ways. Yet a scapegoat need not enact the role night-after-night, as if indentured to a long running play. All of the players in the small ensemble can, at last, say “enough.” Ironically, the one who saw the home-grown theater for what it was — the one who suffered the most — has a head start for the sign marked EXIT. The bright letters shine in the darkness and lead to a world of possibilities.

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The top painting is Franz von Stuck’s Sisyphus. An illustration by Koloman Moser follows: A Modern Tantalus. Both are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.