The Scapegoat Who Wouldn’t Break: Grief, My Brother, and Letting Go of False Guilt
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Editor’s Note: This is a grief-processing entry, written to heal, honour, and tell the truth of what the Lord is walking me through. Names and details have been adjusted out of respect for every person involved.
There are stories you only see clearly when you stop trying to be “understanding” and finally tell the truth.
This is one of them.
For a long time, I couldn’t understand why the family of the couple I briefly lived with seemed determined to tear my character apart. People who barely knew me formed opinions with razor edges. Stories circulated that didn’t match the woman I knew myself to be.
I was the one who cooked.
The one who cleaned.
The one who tried to contribute, even when I had nothing.
The one who left immediately when asked, even though I didn’t know where I would sleep next.
Yet somehow, in their narrative, I became the problem.
And then I finally saw it:
This wasn’t just relational.
It was spiritual.
It was scapegoating.
I walked into that environment carrying strength, discernment, emotional intelligence, and the Holy Spirit. That system relied on silence, control, guilt, and appearances.
I did not fit.
And sometimes your very presence confronts what people are unwilling to face.
The retaliation followed a familiar pattern:
attack
projection
distortion
isolation
scapegoat
I was not a threat because I was wrong.
I was a threat because I was true.
But the deepest part of my pain from that season is not anchored in that family at all.
It is anchored in my brother.
Because the timeline looks like this:
They lied.
He believed them.
I was pushed out.
I became homeless again.
And later, he took his own life.
If you freeze the story there, it is easy to tie a noose of guilt around your own throat and call it responsibility.
For years I carried the whisper: What if it was you?
But when I walk back through the details honestly, the truth rearranges everything.
My brother was drowning long before my crisis ever touched him.
He was traumatised from childhood.
Exhausted by life.
Worn down by shame, depression, and internal torment.
He had battled suicidal thoughts long before that year.
I did not hand him his pain.
I collided with it.
And then came the day he visited my new flat after I’d been homeless for a year — the one with bare floors, no appliances, and nothing but faith holding me together. I told him we had just come out of the homeless shelter. I pressed money into his hands for helping me move — money I could not afford, but gave because I would not let anyone call me a user.
He didn’t want to take it.
I insisted.
Looking back now, I see it clearly:
that was the moment the lie shattered for him.
He saw the empty rooms.
He saw the truth of my situation.
He saw that I had fed my son while quietly going hungry.
He saw that I had paid my way even when it cost me.
He saw that I had no one — and still refused to rage or retaliate.
He saw me.
And if you want to know what breaks a sensitive man, it’s this:
not discovering someone has been cruel…
but realising someone has been kind,
and you did not stand beside them when it mattered.
I can’t prove it.
But I know it in my spirit.
That moment haunted him.
Almost exactly a year later, to the day, he took his life.
The timing is not random.
Anniversaries resurrect memories.
“This time last year…” becomes a knife.
Add to that the generational wounds, the family dynamics, the unequal treatment between siblings, the inheritance pressures, the shame…
It created a perfect storm in a man already fighting to stay alive.
My presence did not create his pain.
My reality confronted him with it.
And that is what grieves me most:
I didn’t want the truth to crush him.
I just wanted reconciliation.
I wanted healing.
I wanted time.
The ache rising in me now is not guilt.
It is mourning for what we never got to repair.
For the truth he finally glimpsed, but never got to live in.
For the brother I loved, who loved me too — more than he could bear to show in this life.
This is not a verdict against me.
This is grief.
Pure, holy grief.
And I cannot ignore the wider context.
The pandemic era shattered mental health on a scale we still don’t fully comprehend.
It crushed the fragile.
It suffocated the isolated.
It unravelled those already fighting to stay afloat.
My brother was one of them.
I was not the wound.
I was the mirror.
And now, a year later, as the Lord walks me through this awakening, He has placed His hand on the final hidden stone in my heart — the secret fear that I somehow added to his pain.
No.
I loved my brother.
I honoured him.
I stayed soft where bitterness wanted to grow.
I bore consequences without retaliating.
And when he saw the truth, it broke him — not because I harmed him, but because he cared.
The grief I feel now is the love that has nowhere left to go.
So I am laying down the false guilt.
I am honouring the grief.
And I am letting the Lord rewrite the narrative the enemy tried to bury me under for the past few years.
This is not blame.
This is release.
A painful, holy closing of a chapter that nearly drowned us both.
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
— Psalm 34:18
With fire and grace,
This message carries fire. Pass it on. 👇🏻
Victoria Player is the founder of Daughter of Thunder, a movement awakening spiritually sensitive women to truth, purpose, and divine power in a world that’s lost its compass. After walking through her own season of fire and rebuilding, she now writes and speaks to those who sense there’s more — guiding them from confusion to clarity, from awakening to assignment.
“I don’t bow to Babylon — I walk with the Lion.” — Daughter of Thunder
