“Why Me?”

The most common question I hear from people who were the black sheep, misfit or outsider of their family is some version of why me?

Why was I singled out? Why did they hate me? Or simply “why?”

I hear from people every week who are asking it. Some are 20 years old and some are in their 70s or 80s.

At some point they’ve been told in reassuring terms that “it wasn’t your fault.” Either by a therapist, a friend, a significant other.

And they often try to remind themselves this too.

If you are reading this, you’ve probably asked “why me?” too.

In a few short pages, I’m going to answer this question in a few different ways.

Not to have you dwell on the past, but because a better sense of why this happens can help you untangle yourself from the story and move forward.

I’ve written this for those who were treated as the black sheep or scapegoat of their family. If you’re at all unsure of what I mean by that, let me take a brief moment to define these terms:

The black sheep of the family is the one who was seen and treated as the odd person out from the rest of the family. Their differences were often seen as problems or flaws.

If this was you, who you authentically are wasn’t welcomed on some level. And belonging in your family might have felt like it came with conditions and a pressure to change.

The scapegoat is a role that can overlap with the black sheep, but it’s also an experience all its own that some black sheep never had to face. The scapegoat was not only different, but was blamed and shamed for anything and everything.

If this was you, it was your fault when things went wrong even when you weren’t in the room. You were bullied, experienced double standards and watched as siblings were given preferential treatment.

Eventually you discovered that no matter what you did, there was no way to escape the way others saw you.

You may relate to one and not the other, or you might see yourself in both.

Either way, both of these outsider experiences can leave you with the same question: Why me?

Why is anyone assigned to be the black sheep or scapegoat?

To understand why you were treated this way, we need to acknowledge how belonging works in families.

In an ideal family situation, everyone belongs. People’s differences are either welcomed or at the very least, aren’t seen as a threat to the family. The natural tension of people living in close proximity is dealt with directly.

Ruptures happen, but repair happens too (Tronick, 2007). It’s not always perfect, but children acting as they naturally do doesn’t become evidence that they are unworthy of love or care.

This is not how belonging works in many families.

Instead, love and belonging is treated as something that can be earned or lost. Differences in children are seen as unacceptable or dangerous. And family members may squash these differences, or shame them, to pressure others into obedience or conformity.

Deeper still, one of the ways families manage their discomforts with difference and individuality is that they begin to label and treat children by assigning them certain roles.

Some are made to feel good and innocent, while others are treated as guilty, bad or unwanted.

This cruel behavior has three functions:

It keeps deeper problems hidden.

When there’s a designated problem child in the family, it helps people avoid deeper issues. Marital issues, drinking, money problems, secrets and abuse are not only off-limits to talk about, it’s dangerous to bring attention to them.

If a child speaks up about them, or simply cannot hide the impact the dysfunction is having on them, the family may attempt to reinforce silence and obedience through bullying or withholding love. As so often happens, the child who speaks up or is sensitive to what’s going on suddenly gets turned into the problem child.

When a family does this, it’s like saying “The problem isn’t dad’s drinking, the problem is that you’re the only one that isn’t going along with it.”

And in one move the family shoots the messenger and avoids the message.

It keeps the ‘in crowd’ bonded together.

It’s a sad truth about humans in community that one of the ways groups of people stay close is to choose a shared enemy (Girard, 1986). This happens in every level you can think of from nations to business to the nuclear family.

And at the family level, having one scapegoat or black sheep defines what others shouldn’t become. If you had siblings, the rulebook for who they should be, how they should think, and what was safe was largely written by how they watched you get treated.

It gives everyone’s worst feelings somewhere to go.

Here’s the easiest way I can explain it: Every family carries shame, guilt, anger, fear, disappointment and regrets that can be hard to admit. But if you were in a family where people simply could not tolerate these feelings, and refused to face them, they might have tried to outsource them to someone else.

The black sheep or scapegoat is the person where those feelings landed.

For example, if deep down a parent struggles with feeling like they’re a failure, they might unconsciously outsource that feeling to one of their children (Bowen, 1978). Over time they become resentful of one or more of their children. They might start saying things to them like “you ruined my life,” or “I wish you were never born.” Or they might treat the child as though they are a failure.

In all instances, instead of facing this uncomfortable feeling within them, or taking accountability for decisions they made, the child gets blamed. Sadly, it offers momentary relief when you can point the finger at someone else instead of looking within.

Why you:

Now that you know the most common reasons a family has insiders and outsiders in the first place, we can get to the heart of the question.

Your family needed someone to blame, and it served a function. But why you? Why you and not someone else? What was it about you?

Here are the most common answers which come from the family outsiders I speak to, and research on the subject:

1. The family had rigid expectations and rules, you broke them by being yourself.

This is the one you’re probably already aware of, because it’s the part that might have been said out loud and to your face.

You were the artistic child in a conservative family. The daughter in a male-dominated family. The queer kid in a homophobic family. You were neurodivergent and no one knew what to do with that, so it made them angry.

There were rules about what was of value and what wasn’t, and something about who you were crossed the line.

What made you stand out was that the rest of the family seemed to do just fine staying within those lines. Siblings did what they were trained to do. Mom didn’t stand up to Dad because she knew it was dangerous.

2. You said the uncomfortable thing aloud (the truth teller experience)

The things that everyone had consciously or unconsciously agreed not to say, you said.

You brought attention to the truth about the abuse, drinking or secrets that were impacting you and others. The truth teller turns quickly into the scapegoat when the family refuses to look at the uncomfortable realities and instead chooses to blame the messenger (John, Blunden & Liu, 2019).

Someone once commented this and it describes it perfectly:

“It’s like when you speak about the elephant in the room, suddenly you become the elephant.”

What unfolds next is that the truth about anything becomes a battleground.

Speak up and you’ll be told “that never happened,” “you’re making things up,” or “it wasn’t a big deal.”

3. You were the sensitive one (the empath experience)

Being the sensitive one in a family that doesn’t want to feel uncomfortable feelings can be dangerous.

Even crying too long, or too loudly could make you a target (Jensen & Jorgensen-Wells, 2025) in a family that wants to avoid its grief or keep emotions bottled up.

If this was you, it was easier for the family to say your emotions were the problem than to look at why they couldn’t tolerate seeing them. Or why everyone else seemed so emotionless by comparison.

4. You dreamed bigger or were on a path out.

Sometimes simply being a child who is intelligent, driven, or curious hits a tripwire you wouldn’t expect: You triggered envy, other people’s regrets or their limitations.

You may have found yourself in a world with more opportunities, access to education or jobs that were out of reach for your parents. And so your drive or questioning nature represented something they never got to have.

Instead of facing the uncomfortable feelings it brought up, it may have set off a sort of retaliation. Family might have gossiped about you behind your back, tried to take you down a peg and said things designed to make you feel that believing in yourself was a form of arrogance or selfishness.

5. You were the child who kept trying.

Not everyone who was the black sheep or scapegoat was a rebel.

Belonging is a literal survival need (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), and most children will do anything to get it back if they feel they’ve lost it.

Sometimes, the child who keeps coming back is the safe one to blame.

If this was you, you were probably quick to apologize, people please or try to earn safety or care in any way you could.

And so in this instance, keeping you in a state of feeling ‘not good enough’ might have functioned to keep you on a hamster wheel of always trying to be accepted (but never getting there).

The family might have even sensed that you would leave otherwise, see the truth, or stop being the helper or in-house therapist they needed you to be. And so treating you as the problem kept you small and caring for people’s needs while never getting any credit.

6. You reminded them of someone else.

This one might take you by surprise. Sometimes who you were reminded the people around you of someone they had unresolved issues with (Bowen, 1978).

You might have had your mother’s face or temperament, and your father never forgave her. So when you reminded him of her, he took it out on you.

You might have been very similar to your grandmother, which only becomes a problem if your mother spent her whole childhood at war with that woman. Suddenly their unresolved issues get directed at you.

Maybe you were the spitting image of the aunt who got all the attention, or the brother who left, or some other story that was never said out loud.

When a parent looked at you, they saw what had gone unresolved with someone else. And that baggage landed on your shoulders.

7. Lastly, it was a result of circumstance.

Although it doesn’t make it any easier, sometimes the role you were given was just where you landed.

You were born during the divorce, or the year the money ran out. You became the face of some hard time you had nothing to do with.

The reasons might have been even smaller than that. And if you asked the people who treated you as the outsider they might not even remember why anymore.

Before moving on, step back and notice what these reasons have in common.

None of them are a personal flaw. The first five are things a healthy family could have celebrated about you. The remaining two aren’t about you at all.

Now what?

You have likely been stuck on the question ‘why me?’ for a long time, searching for the answer not just in the story, but within you.

Was it something you did? Something about your character? What was it that seemingly everyone could see but you couldn’t?

And constantly questioning yourself this way comes with its own consequences (Pillemer, Suitor, Pardo & Henderson, 2010).

So many black sheep and scapegoats lose so much energy guarding themselves from the possibility that if anyone really saw them, they would see what was wrong with them. Other people would see what the family always seemed to see.

The first mindset switch is to begin to commit to memory that the way your family treated you tells you what they could not tolerate.

It tells you what was inconvenient for them.

It tells you what caused them to feel things that were too much for them.

What it doesn’t tell you is that you are objectively intolerable, inconvenient or too much.

The way a small group of people you share DNA with treated you doesn’t have to define you.

And in fact, if your family needed someone to be the black sheep or scapegoat in order to manage their own discomfort or put a band-aid over larger issues, they are precisely the people I wouldn’t trust to be an accurate judge of your character.

I’m not expecting you to believe me all at once. Untangling from how other people saw you, and how that affects how you see yourself, is a process that takes time.

But if you take one thing from the section above, I hope it’s this:

The answer to “why me?” is far more likely to be rooted in your family’s story than anything about your character.

A writing exercise to help you explore this

Take out a journal or a piece of paper and choose the most common or memorable word your family used to describe you.

Perhaps it was dramatic, too sensitive, selfish or something else. What comes to mind?

Write it at the top of the page. And as you think about the times it was used, use the rest of the page to explore answers to the following questions:

Take your time.

If at any time this brings up emotions that are too much, pause and consider coming back to it later.

Once you take some time to write out what comes to mind, step back and look at what you’ve written.

If you were speaking to your younger self and they were asking “why me?” has what you written on your sheet of paper answered some part of it? What about the previous section of this document with the 7 most common reasons?

What would you say to that confused child when they asked you “why me?”

Take a moment to consider what you would say now.

You may return to this prompt another day with the same word or a different one.

And over time, you may find it helps you continue to see the larger picture and reclaim some of the energy that can get lost in constantly wondering what’s wrong with you and why people said these things.