In the famous novel by Oscar Wilde, a narcissistic Dorian Gray preserves his own youthful appearance by means of having a portrait of himself in the attic that progressively assumes a more and more hideous quality. Somehow the entropy of ageing is transferred to the portrait, allowing Dorian to maintain his healthful order.
I have found that a somewhat analogous process can occur in families or groups. Instead of a portrait in the attic, one person is selected - unconsciously or sometimes with malign conscious intention - to be the carrier of emotionally negative outcomes in life, such as ill-health, financial poverty, 'bad luck', and general unhappiness. A psychological and energetic system is established whereby this target person receives all the negative energy and thereby suffers on behalf of the group.
The process of selection and targeting of the victim can begin early in that person's life. He or she will be treated differently from the others - a Cinderella. The person may come to identify with this role. Once the psychological system for this is established, the subtle energetic process will follow. Often this whole syndrome will be established and maintained in a kind of half-consciousness - the perpetrators having a partial awareness of what they are doing, but this is buffered by a narcissistic sense of entitlement and a potential sense of guilt too terrible to contemplate. As a result, the perpetrators become ever more entrenched in their position. The victim is bewildered.
Sometimes this process can be undertaken with conscious and profoundly evil intent, using magical rituals involving the victim as a child. Various forms of torture, confusion, directed dissociation, and hypnotic programming can be used to create an identity in the victim of being a kind of toilet, a receptacle for the waste energetic products of the family or group. Such practices may be more widespread than many might assume.
The underlying principle of this is to do with a form of law of entropy. In general, if a person achieves wealth and well-being without earning it, this is a kind of energetic stealing. It creates an entropy debt, which sooner or later must be paid back. The stolen well-being and success will fall away. However, some human beings realised, eons ago, that this pay-back can be circumvented if a sacrificial figure is selected to be the recipient of entropy - that person's life force and informational order is continually siphoned off whilst entropy is directed towards them. These magical beliefs have an energetic reality.