I don't believe there is such a thing as a "wounded ego." The ego is a completely non-personal survival mechanism.
A wounded inner child feels more accurate, which the ego itself is tasked with managing, so it's only doing its job.
Lack of ego awareness is actually the issue.
Emotions are communications from your nervous system to you.
The ego acts as a shitty (albeit well meaning) translator that turns the emotions into a story.
The is not ego interested in whether or not the story it assigns to the emotions is true...only that it's familiar.
The scapegoat is just typically the personified projection point for a family's shame, fear, judgment and lack of inner reckoning.
In other words: they are often subconsciously cast as the external processor for an entire family's unprocessed trauma.
Why I think so many of us struggle with unhappiness:
When things in our lives reconcile on the logical/practical plane - but do not reconcile on the energetic/spiritual plane.
In other words: when our lives make sense on paper, but not in our hearts or our souls.
You'll receive a body, which will act as the vehicle for your soul in this lifetime.
You'll be equipped with an ego and breath to keep you alive.
Your body will have an expiration date.
Your job is to do your best to figure out how to best use your body to serve your soul.
You can be authentic and lack integrity.
You can be in integrity and lack authenticity.
Authenticity and integrity are things you practice daily and they require work.
People that really trust themselves are equally committed to both.
The best thing a parent can do for their child is to teach them how to feel.
Not to fix it, not make the feeling go away, but to hug them, and show them that it's healthy and they are strong enough to feel their way through things.
If you want to feel more at home in your own skin, some of us need to better at not expecting the world to shift around us in exchange for our comfort and some of us need to get better about not forgoing our own comfort in exchange for not tipping over the apple cart.
Balance.
Shadow work helps you uncover your hidden, repetitive patterns (many of which you're unaware of), how unresolved trauma is still affecting you, and the parts of you that you'd rather not look at.
That said: it's as important to your inner work as roots are to a tree.
The biggest disservice in mental health is making the numbing of emotional pain standard protocol without offering any education or support in helping a person understand what it means about them, or how to better hold it - let alone use it as a tool to help them heal.