Repeating Relationship Roles

So, hi everybody, Dr. Barbara here. You might’ve heard me talk about my life and the family I was born into, they were very crazy. And as a result, I became very susceptible to bullies. They blamed me for everything in their life. I was the scapegoat and I was meant to take the blame in the family. All of us in families, we get these roles assigned to us early in life, and we learn to play those roles or else we get kicked out of the family. And some people have good families and it’s really great, and then some people have terrible families like mine and it’s really terrible. The role I was assigned was terrible.

And so what happened as a result of that is, I became very susceptible to bullies. And it’s very difficult to teach somebody to stand up to a bully when all their life they have been taught that they deserve to be bullied. So my whole family bullied me. When I got out of the house I just substituted all my friends. I put all of these people that I met into the roles that were in my family so that I could continue to live my role, which was to take the abuse from the bully. And that’s what I continued to do.

So most of my friends were bullies, and I allowed them to treat me badly because that’s the role I was taught to play in life. And it wasn’t until at the age of 34 that I realized that I had been abused. And I had also gotten sober at this point because being abused and taking the role as the scapegoat, really, you need alcohol to survive that kind of stuff. And I actually had therapists say to me, “Thank God you drank, or you probably would’ve killed yourself.” So it is much easier to survive that stuff when you’re drinking.

But I finally figured out that they had done it to me and that I didn’t deserve it. And then I began to understand that I was continuing that relationship over and over and over again, because I thought that’s the role I had to play in my life. I was just playing my assigned role out in every relationship that I had with everybody until I figured it out. And I didn’t figure it out until pretty late. So that’s what happened.

I continued to have these bullies in my life until I finally said, “Stop! I don’t have to play that role in my life anymore.” And you don’t either. But you need to understand what is the role you’re playing and how are you going to stop it? And what role do you want to play in your life? So if you don’t have the starring role in your life, you need to create that. So understanding what you’re doing, what I was doing was the most important thing that could have happened to me, and then realizing that I was the one who had to make it stop.

So I hope you find this helpful. It was pretty unhappy in my life until I figured it out, but we don’t have to live unhappy lives. This is our life, my life. I get to choose. This is nobody else’s life. It’s not my mother’s life. My father, my husband, my kid. This is my life. I get to choose what I’m going to do. So I wish you all the best. I hope you find this helpful. Take care.

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