When the Family Joke Isn't Really a Joke

Everyone laughed. Everyone except you.

And if you said something, if you let it show that it landed wrong, that became the next joke. You were too sensitive. You could not take a joke. The humor made the point, and your reaction became the next punchline.

One of my memories is watching home movies with my family, who were laughing watching as my big sister grabbed me from behind as I was crawling and exploring on a sofa. At four years old I said, "Hey, that's not funny. Why are you laughing?" The answer came: "Because you were so cute." I tried hard to accept that. Being cute was nice, right? But I knew something was off. They were older and wiser, and so like a lot of kids do, I put aside my own reaction and trusted the people around me.

People who grew up in families where dismissals or cruelty were delivered through humor often arrive in adulthood without being able to identify what happened to them. Like my story, it can be insidious and even generally benign yet still can reverberate in the nervous system long after the moment has passed.

How Humor Becomes a Delivery System for Abuse

Genuine humor connects people. It is shared, mutual, and moves everyone in the room towards a more solid, positive connection. Abusive humor does the opposite. It targets one person, delivers a message that cannot be said directly, and uses the general rules of how jokes are supposed to work to form a barrier and make that person's pain suddenly the problem.

"I was just joking" does not offer clarification. It deflects. Responsibility should rest with whoever caused the impact. From a trauma lens, the most impactful moment of an attachment injury is when there is no reparation for the injury. So for instance, in my case with family laughing at the home movie, it would have made a world of difference had someone to simply have said, "You didn't like that? I'm sorry. It was not our intension to dismiss or hurt you." Instead, the message I received was: "Trust us. It is funny. You are just too little to get it." That is a response that plants self-doubt and mistrust of one's own perceptions and experience.

In short, if the target laughs, the message lands. If the target objects, the target is the problem. There is no accommodation from the person making the joke, and the discomfort is internalized by the person on the receiving end.

When One Person Always Becomes the Punchline

Families are the first place most people learn self-worth, emotional safety, and trust in their perceptions. When humor is used repeatedly against one person, the effects can show up for years.

In some families, these type jokes may not be evenly distributed. The same person can becomes the regular punchline while everyone else watches or participates. The impact tat may have secondarily to others may also have future negative repercussions. Regularity in who is the butt of a joke tends not to be accidental. It can reflect a role that person has been assigned within the family system, whether anyone named it or not.

Such humor also tends to ripple outward. For instance, when a targeted family member brings home a friend or a partner, that person can become subject to the same treatment. A nickname gets assigned. Something about their appearance or manner becomes joke material. The message is not subtle: the people you choose says something unflattering about you, and we are here to remind you.

That kind of humor creates distance, even when family believe it shows closeness.

The Scapegoat Role

When one family member is the consistent target of this treatment, they are often filling what clinicians call the scapegoat role. Rebecca C. Mandeville, LMFT, CCTP, who coined the term Family Scapegoating Abuse, describes it as a pattern in which one member becomes the consistent target of blame, criticism, or emotional displacement. Many people who grow up in these systems report experiences consistent with complex trauma, betrayal, and chronic shame.

The scapegoat is not chosen randomly. They are often the most perceptive member of the family, the one most likely to notice or name what others avoid. Families engaged in this pattern are often unaware of what they are doing. While the humor may feel normal to them, that does not make it less harmful. It is simply just harder to see.

What It Does to Adult Relationships

The effects of growing up as the family scapegoat often carry into adult relationships in ways that are hard to trace back to a source. That dismissive observation gets repeated until it takes hold. The person being targeted starts to hear the family's voice even when the family is not in the room. Adult relationships that fall apart rarely get counted as damage connected to such a pattern. But they are.

Other effects that commonly show up in adulthood include:

• Difficulty trusting your own perceptions after years of being told your reactions were wrong

• A persistent sense of shame that has no clear source

• Hypervigilance in relationships, waiting for the joke that lands wrong

• Trouble believing that people who care about you actually do

• An internalized critical voice that sounds a lot like the family

These are not character flaws. They are adaptations to an environment that was not safe.

Why It Is Hard to Name

I have found people tend not to grasp that what happened was impactful because it was not extreme or violent. There was not a single catastrophic event. The pattern of being dismissed and mocked was effective. It passed as a joke and as “normal”.  When a joke comes at another person’s expense, wrapped in humor, it leaves no obvious mark and gives its deliverer grounds to dismiss injurious impact, while teaching the person who receives it to question their own experience and self-worth.

Having a name for it matters -not to assign blame or relitigate the past, but because naming what happened is often the first step toward understanding why certain patterns in adult life feel so familiar and why it is so hard to make shifts.

What Therapy Can Address

The work I do with people who carry a history with these types of encounters is not about building a case against the family. It is about understanding the impact those early experiences had on you, your sense of worth and lovability, and how those messages are still shaping how you see yourself and your relationships. That often includes tracing the internalized critical voice back to its source, grieving relationships that were damaged or lost, and building the capacity to trust your own perceptions, sometimes for the first time. For many people, trauma-informed work including parts work, EMDR, or Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) can help untangle these patterns at a level that talk alone does not always reach.

If you grew up in a family where the jokes were not really jokes, and you have spent years carrying something you did not have a name for, that is worth looking at. If you are ready to do that work, you can reach me at 845-202-9774.