The scapegoat always gets blamed by the bystander and enablers for the verbal abuse, even if they didn't start it.

It's that simple, really.

If my mom wakes up in a horrible mood and decides to scream at me relentlessly for something petty like buying her the wrong brand of noodles or not following her kitchen procedure correctly, I'll usually stay quiet and disengage, trying to calm her down to no avail.

Then my father walks in and whines, "Aww, come on, you two are fighting again?" Meanwhile, I'm not even engaging, yet he still acts like the confrontation is going both ways and that it's my fault she's in a rage. This kind of environment creates people-pleasers because the byproduct is feeling small: being treated as if you're always to blame for someone else's abuse and their destructive coping mechanism.

That's what happened today. My dad, who's perfectly content to let my mom wreak havoc verbally as long as it doesn't affect him, heard my mom throwing a temper tantrum in the kitchen as always and asked, "Are you two fighting again?"

I answered him calmly, "No, but one of us is. It's a one-sided argument," and then I walked out. THAT really got under my mother's skin because she knew I was right. She was the one having a conniption because I was asking her about my headache symptoms when I wasn't even arguing with her. That's just how she is. She's calm one minute and then the next she's blowing a gasket over nothing.

I've seen this kind of toxic dynamic in other things. Usually the person a narcissist targets for their verbal tirades is assumed to be part of the problem even if they're not arguing back or provoking fights.