Whose Shame Are You Carrying? How Abusers Offload Pain to Avoid Accountability

This episode explores one of the most insidious aspects of emotional abuse: shame offloading. 

When someone can’t face their own emotional wounds—whether it’s failure, inadequacy, or internal contradictions—they often project that pain onto the person closest to them. 

You become the emotional scapegoat, the one who’s blamed, punished, or humiliated—not because you did something wrong, but because they can’t sit with their own discomfort.

I walk through how this dynamic shows up in abusive relationships, how it fractures your sense of safety and self, and why the nervous system starts to adapt to the abuse as a form of survival. 

I explore how abusers develop internal scripts to justify their behavior, how survivors unconsciously internalize those scripts, and what it takes to start breaking that pattern.