scapegoating

Scapegoating occurs when a person externalizes responsibility for his or her feelings, stories or actions, and blames them on someone else.  The offender usually does not think of his reaction as scapegoating but as a reasonable and warranted response to an external provocation: “He or she made me feel, think or act this way.”

Scapegoating has been ritualized in certain cultures, keeping our collective conscience clean by displacing guilt onto a designated target which is then socially ostracized, or killed.

In secular cultures, scapegoating is still justified by assuming a god’s eye view, a position of undisputed righteousness which convicts and condemns: “X is just plain wrong!”  Moral rationalizations like these can be so convincing that the target may actually find himself owning not only his own feelings, stories and actions, but the scapegoater’s as well.  Accepting fault or blame for others’ stories is what happens in false confessions.

Although there may be no external authority by which to defend our boundaries, when we mistake subjective valuations for objective truths, ignoring the difference between personal experience and the world at large, we expand our freedom beyond the borders of our own conscience and threaten to impinge on someone else’s.

Sorry (no ifs, ands or buts)

Your partner wants an apology.    

You begin:

“Sorry, honey...“

Then add:

“If I hurt you”

“But I didn’t mean to”

“And It wasn’t my fault”

Better to stop at sorry than to tag on an if, and or but.  These make your apology about defending or excusing yourself, wiping the slate clean for your own sake rather than your partner’s.

Saying sorry isn't about dodging blame so I can feel better about myself.  It's about expressing regret that I've hurt you so you can feel better about me.

Whose problem is it anyway?

There is a tendency to want to blame someone else for how we feel about them.  We’ll say, for example, that You’re annoying me rather than say, more truthfully, that I am annoyed by your behaviour, a semantic and cognitive tweak that shifts the onus for my feelings onto someone else in a moment of confusion about the source of my experience.  

 

According to infant psychiatrists, this is what babies do.  Before they are able to differentiate between themselves and the external world, before they acquire the sense of an “I”, infants confuse their bodily experience (inside) with what is going on peripherally (outside), in a symbiotic relationship with the world and those around them.

Once I acquire a sense of self, however, I can know myself as the source of how I feel such that, when others’ behaviour triggers bad feelings in me, I know that is not their “fault”, let alone their problem.  To hold them responsible for how I feel is a regressive delusion, not to mention counter-productive, particularly if others don’t have a problem with their behaviour, or don’t want to change just because I want them to.

What’s more, in blaming others for how we feel, we declare war against them, escalating an already problematic situation.  The origin of the word war is the German verwirren "to confuse, perplex" and, indeed, when the boundaries between your experience and mine become blurred or confused in this way, violence is a real possibility.

So, unless someone has misused a position of power with me or broken an implicit or explicit agreement, he or she is not responsible for my feelings and I cannot blame him or her for my feeling hurt or upset  by his or her behaviour.  My feelings are my own reaction, not universal signposts by which do judge others.  If we are involved in a dance that doesn’t work for me, like it or not, that makes it my problem.  

The only person I can change is myself and, if I’m not happy with how someone behaves, I’m the only one who can do anything about it.

Big disclaimer: This is not to be used as a way to push responsibility for an act of aggression back onto the victim.  Acts of aggression are not projections.  They also blur and transgress boundaries.