Worried about accidentally looking bad

Does anyone else have an excessive worry about being made to look bad? Like something happens, like for example, something falls and breaks and you were the only one nearby. When other people see what happened, they automatically assume it was you that broke it and get extremely mad. My family, mainly siblings, do this a lot to me. Like a toilet will be clogged and I will be the one to find it and they just assume I was the one that clogged it even though I didn't.

Another example is that I will be in the bathroom or in my room, not realizing that everyone had left and the last person to leave left all the doors unlocked and sometimes even wide open in the process. When my parents, especially my dad, would return and see that, he would get extremely mad at me, assuming I knew the doors were wide opened and I purposely left them like that. Same for other stuff, it is as if they think I always screw things up or something.

It has gotten to the point where if I find out I will be home alone and someone is about to leave, I will actually go in the kitchen, usually make myself occupied to make it less obvious, and wait patiently for them to leave. Once they are gone, I will go shutting and locking the front and back doors of the house. And sometimes even the garage door if I suspect that it didn't close properly or not at all, a rare occurrence, but it does happen at times.

Same for other things, if I notice something is wrong, and I appear to find out first, I secretly get so frustrated and anxious since I expect everyone to assume I had something to do with it. My siblings don't have the courage to unclog a toilet, so they just leave it like that. My brother usually will do nothing and let someone else deal with it, but my sister will usually run and tell someone. And if I find that everyone has left the house without my knowledge, which is also very rare now, unlike before, I will also secretly get really annoyed.

At the same time, when I find out everyone has left and I find doors unlocked and opened, I will not only feel annoyed, but also relieved that I actually found out first before anyone returned home and assumed I just didn't care and left everything open on purpose. When I was a child, I had the tendency to let people accuse me of things I never did, so I blame myself for that. I should have stood up for myself more. But I didn't.

I feel like that is part of the reason it happens. People, especially my family, have the mindset that they can just accuse me of stuff that I didn't do since they think I will just accept it as my responsibility. And when I do stand up for myself, they assume I just can't accept responsibility and think I'm being difficult. I wish there was a way to get this kind of behavior to stop. That is another reason why I hate being home, it is like nothing I do is right and I do everything wrong whether it was my responsibility or not.

I am not close with my family either. In general, we are not a close family. My family actually knows less about my personal life, such as previous college life, than they think they do. I am actually not myself around them. The reason is because of how I feel like I am a scapegoat to everyone. It doesn't really happen outside of my family. It is really rare. There are only a very few instances where people assumed I did something when I didn't. Like, when I was very little, someone thought I had told someone to shut up, when I didn't, and I got in trouble for that.

Another time, someone on my bus got me in trouble for "bullying" even though I was actually trying to help him and stop it even though I couldn't. I got in trouble by the principal, who told me I was a bully. I don't know how I was expected to stop two other people from a different school from calling a 10 year old boy names. We were all around the ages of like 10-14 years old. Had it happened now since I am 26, I would have asked the principal why she can't actually help intervene since that was what I was thinking in my head at the time. She just expected me to make it stop, which was out of my control. Just don't understand why people find the need to do that.

Hello rdgrad15: Thank you for sharing these frustrating experiences. I can't say as I can relate to this since I have no family (other than my spouse) & no friends or acquaintances. As a result there's pretty-much no one to blame me for anything, whether I did it or not. I guess it's one of the perks of being a recluse...

The way I see it, the fear of looking bad goes hand in hand with the needs to be valued and acknowledged

Right ... and if a legitimate common need keeps going unmet due to repeated circumstances, maybe developing a fear of the opposite is normal?

Whoa! Thank you for this! You hit the nail on the head!!

Rdgrad15, I understand! I feel the same way. It stinks but i wish i had advice but im still trying to find my way around it! I love what justafriend said! It makes you think!