From Victimhood to Vision: A Scapegoated Mother’s Initiation Through Generational Pain

Welcome back to part two of The Unconscious Scapegoat to Awakened Seer Series.. I want to be upfront with you. While I do not typically offer trigger warnings because I stand for truth, authenticity and building resilience through facing life head on, this chapter of my story includes experiences of narcissistic abuse and domestic violence.

I am not here to shock or provoke you; only to speak truthfully about the experiences that have come to shape me into who I am today.

That said, I fully respect your choice to decide whether you are in the right space to continue reading. But if you do, PART THREE will reveal how that transformation unfolded and how it eventually blossomed into a life I never imagined possible for someone like me.

 

How the Hunger for Belonging Became a Cage

At 22, I found myself in the grip of a deeply narcissistic and violent relationship. It did not begin that way, of course. At first, it felt like heaven. I had been homeless on and off since I was 15, surviving more than living and when he came along, it felt like belonging; like finally being seen. I could finally set down roots and have a home.

It was not love; it was abuse, masked as affection and moments of bonding. In fact, it was trauma bonding, a pattern I had been groomed for since childhood, and I was too wounded to recognise the difference.

I had been wandering like the scapegoat through a desert my whole life, starving for love, parched for warmth, acceptance and connection.

So when he showed up with what seemed like an abundant well in the middle of my desert, I did not hesitate. I drank deeply, desperate for relief. I did not realise the water was poisoned until it was already inside me.

I had been shaped to believe that love meant surviving chaos. That control was safety. That cruelty was normal. So I called it love, because I did not know what love was.

“You accepted less because you thought a little was better than nothing.”
— R,H. Sin

The emotional and psychological abuse started small; little things that chipped away at who I was. Over time, it intensified; growing more evident, darker, until I barely recognised myself.

That is when the violence began.

Slowly, then all at once, what little confidence I had collapsed entirely. Whatever fragile pieces of self worth I had managed to piece together were stripped away until I was a ghost of my former self.

And like any good scapegoat, I blamed myself.

• I told myself it was me.

• I was the problem.

• I was the reason he raged and hurt me.

• I was the reason I could not seem to hold onto love or kindness like other people did.

Somewhere deep down, I believed I was broken, that I did not deserve any better.

That real, loving relationships just were not for people like me.

It was my fault that I was not worthy of love.

 

The Soul That Chose Me

And then one day, out of nowhere, something amazing happened. It changed my life in ways I never expected, and made me who I am today.

I became pregnant.

It changed everything.

When the soul of this child merged with my body, something in me began to shift. It was not dramatic, not at first but it was real. A quiet awakening.

A deeply sacred moment in my life.

 My own spirit had been worn thin, the fire, the feistiness, the fight I once had was slowly being beaten out of me, blow by blow.

But as she began to grow inside me, something unexpected started to stir. A quiet but unmistakable pulse of power, like a faint heartbeat in the dark.

Was it strength? Maybe. A flicker of worth, perhaps. Something I had not felt in a very long time.

She is a double Scorpio in astrology, born of deep waters and fierce will and I often wonder if her soul chose mine for this very reason.

To lend me her strength.

To pour some of her ancient power into my empty cup.

It was as if she was whispering to me from the spirit world:

"You can do it, Mum. Keep going. I am on my way."

And in that, something in me—however bruised—began to rise.

“Some souls choose us to help us remember who we are.”
— Rebecca Campbell

Because slowly, through her, I began to remember who I was and who I was not.

.I began to see through the fog of gaslighting. I started to feel anger; real, righteous anger; for the first time in a long while. Not just the reactive kind, but the deep, clarifying kind that signals change is afoot.

The violence had stopped during my pregnancy, but the emotional abuse had not.

 

Clawing My Way Out of the Abyss

After years of being beaten down; first at home, and then in my first adult relationship; I was finally beginning to feel... different.

More awake.

And that is when things became worse.

So much worse.

Because that is often how it goes when we start breaking free from the cycles that have held us captive. The moment we begin to reclaim even a sliver of our power, the forces that thrived in that chaos push back harder.

‘Wetiko’, the dark force that feeds from the suppressed and wounded parts within us all, was now working through him more desperately than ever.

I was trying to find a way out. Even though the physical violence had paused, I knew the storm was still brewing. I had a newborn now, and the stakes were so much higher.

But how could I escape? I had no money; no furniture; no support system or family. I was living in a rough neighbourhood surrounded by gangsters, addicts, sex workers, and people society had cast aside, just as I had been.

My reality felt like a prison, and I did not yet have the tools to know how to break free.

To make things worse, my home felt energetically heavy and hostile; like a dark weight pressing down on me. I did not understand then what I know now: it was filled with malevolent entities from the astral realm, like invisible predators sucking the last bits of life from my weary body.

It was like being a fly caught in a spider’s web; every struggle to break free only made the trap tighter and stickier, dragging me deeper into the mess.

I started praying;

“Please God," I begged, "help me find a way out. I cannot keep living like this."

And then... life answered the call.

 

Awakening Through Terror

Soon after this, I was jolted awake by the sound of him crashing through the door one night, drunk, volatile, and full of rage.

Something in him sensed that I was breaking free; and for someone consumed by shadows, losing that power and control was not going to happen.

He did not say a word. He stormed in, wild and relentless. The beatings had not ended as I had naively believed; they had merely been paused, like the gathering of a storm.

 That night, the darkness he so often tried to conceal fully emerged. He beat me with a fury I had never seen before; so violent, so overwhelming, that a part of my soul fragmented and left my body in self defence.

My daughter’s terrified screams pierced through the madness. She was crying frantically from her cot, pure fear in her tiny voice. That painful sound brought me back from the brink of totally dissociating and leaving my body.

I knew I had to get to her. But he was between us, and every instinct screamed that if I tried, I might not survive. Still, leaving her there was never an option. I begged God for strength and charged; like a mother lion, like a rugby player, like someone who had nothing left to lose.

I scooped her up in my arms, searching wildly for an escape route.

I ran for the door; but he tackled me. I hit the floor hard, clutching my baby close to my heart. Then he straddled me, pressing his hands around my throat. I could not breathe. I could feel my life force draining away, even as I fought back with all my might.

Everything began to dim.

Once more, I had the sensation of being outside of my body.

All I could think was:

“Not like this.

Not in front of her.

Please God help me.”

And then a miracle.

A loud knock at the front door. Firm. Repeated.

An eighty year old neighbour, bless her brave soul, had heard the screams. She refused to leave. She kept knocking, yelling that she would call the police if he did not answer. Something in her persistence stopped him.

He froze.

And in that moment, I ran.

I scooted out from under him, baby in arms, and bolted through the door straight into that neighbour’s home. I was shaking, covered in bruises, my face swollen beyond recognition.

My body was broken, but my spirit had made it out.

Barely.

It was in that moment, bloodied, battered and holding my screaming daughter, that I felt something inside of me fracture. A part of my soul splintered and drifted away. I began to dissociate again. I was no longer fully present in my body.

It was just too much.

Too much to feel.

Too much to process.

Too much to hold.

 

Vow of the Cycle Breaker

As I sat shaking in my neighbour’s home, bruised and battered, something fierce and absolute rose within me, despite my dissociation.

What was left of me made a vow, not merely a thought, but a sacred inner pledge to my higher self:

“No one would ever do that to me again. No matter how trapped I felt; no matter how hard the road; I would never let myself or my daughter endure that kind of violence or abuse again”.

The line had been drawn.

I would not pass down the scapegoat crown.

It ended with me.

No matter what it took.

I had watched my own mother endure beatings, humiliation, and the soul crushing weight of abuse. I had witnessed the terror in her eyes, the silence in her screams, and the deep fractures in her spirit. And now I had become her; living out the trauma I thought I had escaped.

But I refused to hand that legacy to my child.

I was going to find another way.

“It didn’t start with you, but it can end with you.”
— Mark Wolynn

Breaking generational patterns is not a clean or linear path. It is messy. Painful. Complex.

As I severed ties with him and tried to piece together some kind of life, the reality of what I was facing hit me like a tidal wave; the isolation, the lack of resources, the trauma, the weight of being both mother and survivor.

It was too much, and I began to drown in it.

 

Drinking to Disappear

Unfortunately, I developed severe complex PTSD from that experience. I found I was constantly in survival mode; hyper-vigilant, dissociated, emotionally raw.

My nervous system was shattered.

To cope, I turned to what was available: alcohol.

Numbing became easier than feeling. It dulled the pain; blurred the fear; and offered me a temporary escape from the weight of everything I was holding.

"Addiction is not about substance—you are the substance. It is the craving for yourself."
— Marion Woodman

But with that escape came a deep shame.

I began to emotionally detach from my daughter. I cared for her physical needs; I fed her, bathed her, held her; but the spark, the presence, the warmth... I struggled to access it.

I began going out more; pubs, clubs, chasing moments of oblivion; and returned home to care for her the next day, hungover and hollow. I was becoming the very thing I had sworn I would not be.

Until one night drunk as hell, I was washing my hands in a pub bathroom, I looked up and caught my reflection in the mirror. And what I saw stopped me cold.

I did not recognise the woman staring back.

She looked like the living dead; pale, vacant, depleted. There was no light in her eyes.

No soul behind them. Just a ghost.

 I heard a voice come from outside myself:

"Keep going, Caroline. You can do it. You are meant for more."

Something about that moment shocked me awake.

It was my reckoning.

I realised then that if I did not change, I would lose everything, not just my child, but myself.

The small ember that was still alive inside me flickered:

“I will not become my mother. I will not abandon my child; not emotionally, not spiritually, not in any way.”

That was the turning point.

 

My Dark Night of the Soul

I reached out to my postnatal nurse and, through that, was connected with the mental health team. Soon after, I found myself in a day centre for women who had experienced psychological breakdowns. Although at the time I believed I was spiralling into my mother’s fate, in truth, I now see that it was something else entirely.

It was my first dark night of the soul.

Back then, I did not know about ancestral trauma; I did not understand the mechanics of reincarnation or the soul’s mission across lifetimes. I did not yet realise that cycle breakers often rewalk the very path their ancestors did, not as punishment but as a spiritual trial, to see if we can meet those same soul wounds and choose differently; to elevate the entire lineage.

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
— Carl Jung

I had not yet understood that I was not failing. In my pain and suffering, I was in fact awakening. And this - this was the very beginning of the path from scapegoat to seer.

 

The First Flame of Return

It was there, amidst the echoing halls of the day centre, the stillness of broken people and the quiet spaces where no one demanded I be anything, that something began to shift.

Slowly, like green shoots pushing through rubble, I started to let go of the belief that I was doomed to repeat the cycle.

And in that space, a new determination began to take root.

I learned to meditate; I learned to breathe again, not just physically but spiritually. I discovered a stillness beneath the noise, a kind of awareness that sat just outside the pain of my existence. It was through this inner silence that my soul, so long silenced, began to speak.

I felt, for the first time, that I was more than the trauma I had survived; that maybe, just maybe, there was a deeper meaning, a purpose, even a destiny woven into my experience. I began to sense that everything I had walked through had not just happened to me but also for something greater that was still unfolding.

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."
— Carl Jung

And with that came a flood, an overwhelming surge of love for my daughter that poured back into me like warm light.

As I returned to my body, I returned to her.

The numbness that had once cloaked my heart, began to melt. And in its place came anger, not the chaotic kind but the holy kind. Righteous anger. The kind that roars from the soul and says: no more; not like this. I refuse to walk this path any longer; I will carve a new one.

I looked at her, this radiant, innocent being and knew I had to summon every last drop of courage to get us out of this hell.

Because I loved her that much.

I was done with being the scapegoat.

She was not going to follow my dysfunction. I would not hand her the same script that had been handed to me. I would not watch history repeat through her.

I was going to be the generational cycle breaker.

So I got angry….really angry.

I began to challenge everything I had been taught about who I was supposed to be. I questioned the roles; the rules; the lies I had swallowed whole. I began to strip away every label that had been forced onto me, unworthy, broken, shameful and I dared to ask:

What if they were never true to begin with?

And in that questioning, I began to live as though I mattered. Because if I could rise, then maybe she would never have to fall in the same way as I had done so often.

The thought of her growing up with a half-present, half-broken mother? It broke my heart. I could not allow it.

So I let the first stirrings of transformation take root, I let the initiation begin.

And I did it for her. Not for recognition; not for redemption; but out of the deepest love I had ever known.

She became my North Star. My reason. My sacred reminder that we were both meant for more.

And as I watched her sleep, play and laugh, so full of light, something in me began to rise. The shame I had carried like a second skin started to alchemise, not into self hate this time, but into fire.

Protective. Potent. Holy fire.

And I began to learn to harness that fire, not to destroy, but to forge; not to project, but to propel.

This was no longer survival. This was the beginning of the process of individuation and coming back to wholeness.

 

From Ashes to Ascent

As I continued to be fuelled by love and fierce determination, I put myself through university with a one year old baby balanced on my hip and the weight of a lifetime of pain on my shoulders.

It was not easy. Nothing about it was. But I worked relentlessly, like my life depended on it. Because in so many ways, it did.

After years of study, sleepless nights and rising before dawn while the rest of the world still slept, I completed my degree. Then, somehow, I secured a position within a local governmental department. I slowly began to rise, one rung at a time, through systems I had once only watched from afar.

Eventually, I landed a senior leadership role, managing multi million pound contracts and holding my own at tables where people like me were never expected to sit.

From a council estate to high level management, I had beaten the odds. But that uphill climb had taken almost everything from me. Still, I was relentless in my determination to give my daughter the life she truly deserved.

I created a home filled with love, safety and warmth for her, a haven where she could lay her head each night without fear. A place where her childhood could be gentle and free, not marked by pain or chaos.

 For the first time in my life, I felt a flicker of something like belonging, a quiet sense of place in a world where I had always felt like an outsider.

I had become a woman who looked like she had it all together. A woman with a career, a gorgeous child, a car, stylish clothes, a beautiful home, money in the bank and a tidy little life.

I blended in.

Maybe I was not broken after all.

Maybe I had finally arrived.

But I was not living this life for appearances, I was living it for her.

Every step forward was for her freedom; her power to choose who she wanted to be in this world, without the shackles I had worn.

That was my mission. Her freedom to choose.

It was a powerful force, and it supplied me with the fuel to keep going.

 

The Cost of “Making It”

But underneath all that fire and movement simmered something far more fragile.

A whisper.

A quiet, nagging voice inside that said:

“This is not really yours.

Any moment now, they will find out.

Someone will tap you on the shoulder and say, You are not meant to be here.

You do not belong.

Go back to where you came from.”

That voice haunted me. It was the voice of the shadow within the scapegoat.

The exile.

The one always left behind.

Impostor syndrome clung to me like a second skin. Even as I dressed the part and played the role, I never truly felt safe in it.

Still, I pushed on; every sacrifice had been worth it. I had protected her. I had shielded her from the legacy of pain. I had offered her a different way.

But there was a cost, a high one.

I was deeply exhausted, not just physically, but soul tired.

Not from the work itself; I was managing funding for homeless projects to give others a chance at life.

I could handle that.

I had handled it and loved it.

But from the politics. The cold ambition. The compromises of character required to survive in those places full of narcissists, psychopaths and power hungry people.

The higher I climbed, the clearer it became: I was in a game I never truly wanted to play.

And worse still, I had been winning at it.

But winning began to feel like losing.

I had built a life of success according to the world’s standards, only to find that the ladder I had climbed leaned against the wrong wall.

“The pressure to succeed and fit in comes at the cost of authenticity.”
— Gabor Maté

The ruthless environment I had entered, one where power was prized more than people, where truth bent to politics and where integrity was optional, began to slowly poison me.

And I started to feel a familiar ache again.

One I had not felt in years.

That quiet, gnawing feeling…

That maybe this was not the end of the story.

Maybe it was only another beginning.

 

Walking Away with Fire in My Chest

So the journey came full circle, not in the way I expected, but in the way only life knows how to orchestrate.

I had once made a vow:

I will not pass the role of the scapegoat to another. Not my daughter. Not anyone.

And here it was again but presented in a different guise.

The same archetypal test.

Except this time, it was cloaked in prestige, power and promises of ease.

I was working inside a system that asked me, in no uncertain terms, to turn a blind eye; to stay silent in the face of corruption; to become them, the very thing I had fought my whole life to free myself from.

They offered me an implied but unspoken deal:

Keep the power.
Keep the money.
Keep the title.

All I had to do was shut my mouth.

Look the other way.

Let others take the fall.

Turn them into scapegoats, to protect the corruption at the top.

 But when you are born into the scapegoat role, you are marked from the start.

You are not here to concur that the ‘emperor has no clothes’.

You are here to call out the lies.

To see the rot others pretend is not there.

And to name it out loud, even when your voice shakes.

Even when it burns everything in your life down.

And it did.

Why?

Because I said no.

Because I refused to gaslight myself or others.

I would not consent to this corrupt masquerade.

I chose truth

I chose soul over security.

I chose integrity over illusion.

So I let go.

I surrendered to the winds of fate, yet again.

I spoke up, exposed what was broken and instantly became the target again for those saturated by the darkness of the ‘Wetiko’ mind virus.

Rolling the dice once more in life’s ruthless game, trusting a higher force would prevail.

And guess what happened?

Just like clockwork…

I became a threat and was returned to scapegoat status once more.

I slid down in the game of ‘snakes and ladders’.

But this time? I saw it for what it was.

I did not beg or plead or try to explain myself or fit in.

“To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés”

Even as I was smeared, blamed and the reputation I had fought so hard to build was torn to shreds, I simply stood up, flicked my hair off my shoulders, gritted my teeth and walked out, and as I reached the door, I turned and stuck up my middle finger and said aloud:

“Fuck off—you do not get to tell me who I am.”

And as I left that towering building of false power, I could hear in my mind:

“Oh no, you don’t.

You do not get to treat me like that.

I refuse to become like you and sell my soul.

I will find another way.

I do not know how, but I trust life.”

 

Archetype in Action

That, my dear reader, is the hallmark of a scapegoat.

I did not have the words for it then, but looking back with the knowledge I have now, I could see the sacred archetypal pattern that had unfolded within my life.

• The scapegoat is the truth teller.
• The silent rebel who refuses to kneel to tyranny.
• The one who walks away from people and systems which are built on silence and shadow.
• Even if it means exile.
• They are the ones who see through darkness and deception, where others choose not to look.
• They are the ones who will never sacrifice another to save themselves.
• The one who steps in when someone is being persecuted and stands up to the bully
• No matter what the personal cost is for them.

And yes, when I walked away, I felt a freedom I had never known.

My spirit soared.

But the alchemy was not complete.

Not yet.

There was still one final initiation to come.

 A deeper death.

A final test that required even deeper faith.

It was coming, it was just around the corner.

A near death experience that would rip the last veil off the illusion of who I thought I was and how I saw the world.

“It is only when we are willing to die to who we think we are, that we awaken to who we really are.”
— Adyashanti

My reality was about to be shattered, reborn.

Not by choice, but by Divine design.

And it would reveal the truth of my soul’s abilities, my path and my purpose in this life.

 

Stay tuned for the final chapter — where death gave birth to my awakening.

If the scapegoat’s path speaks to your soul, then consider joining me for a powerful masterclass on June 5th, 2025 — a space to connect with the sacred fire of truth and awaken the spirit within.

If you feel called, book your place [here].

If you would prefer private 1-2-1 coaching then please book your sessions (here).

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