7: Healing from extremes: Scapegoating

There’s a truism that is sometimes used to let people off the hook: hurt people hurt people. Of course it’s not okay to abuse someone the way you were abused yourself. But with no healing work, how is the cycle supposed to stop? All we know for sure is: abusers are traumatized too, and need help just like the rest of us who are traumatized. As Gabor Mate says, “trauma isn’t what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” Something happened that resulted in their compulsive pursuit of women to bully and dominate without their consent. Sexual harassers are made, not born. The perpetrators were victims, and victims often become the perpetrators. Scapegoating is a short term solution to a much bigger long term problem: narcissism in society and narcissism in ourselves as individuals. Scapegoats serve the purpose of drawing attention away from the real problem: us. In a dysfunctional family, the scapegoat draws attention away from the elephant in the room, such as an abusive parent. A narcissistic parent puts everything they dislike about themselves, their shortcomings and shame, on the scapegoat. And more often than not, the rest of the family either enables or supplies that parent, whether they’re aware of it or not. Narcissistic abusers need a scapegoat to blame, because nothing can ever be their fault. The scapegoat is in us, and we are in them. We have a lot more in common than we’d like to admit, as profoundly uncomfortable as that is to face. Scapegoats are made, not born. They are the symptom, not the root problem, and scapegoating villains makes all of us sicker, more vulnerable, more divided, and in the extreme of all-or-nothing thinking. Instead of destroying or trying to fix them, let’s first try healing the elephant in the room: ourselves.