A Scapegoat's Reaction To Another's Duplicity

By Patricia Lefave, Labelled, D.D.(P).

The only thing needed to create a scapegoat's distressed reaction is the act of an aggressor with a hidden agenda of domination.

If he/she can covertly manipulate a group of people to accept the reality of the situation between him/her and his/her victim as the opposite, and keep the group convinced of it long enough to create enough chaos and pressure to completely confuse the victim, then the result is predictable. The victim's ego structure may well start to break down under the enormous, unrelenting stress, coupled with the inability to either resolve the problem, or escape from the situation.

Once the victim has been ''successfully'' invalidated by the abuser and the group that supports and enables him or her, nothing the victim thinks, says, feels or does will be heard as straightforward communication ever again. It will then be heard through the ''interpretive'' filter of the group's beliefs about what is going on between the original pair.

There is no personal invalidation more complete or inescapable than that structured by the dysfunctional group, whether family, school, work or elsewhere. It becomes an infinite circular argument often resulting in the total invalidation and control of the group's scapegoat, all possible escape routes already blocked by the platitudes of dysfunction, long before the victim was ever even targeted by the abuser.

All has already been defined as faults found within the victim, supposedly ''proving'' the inherent defectiveness of the group's scapegoat, and justifying the behaviour of them all, including the abuser who usually remains unrecognized in the situation by everyone except the victim. Sometimes though, even the victim doesn't understand how it all happened.

The result is often a metaphysical illness in the scapegoat, created under enormous and relentless pressure. It is created BY defining it's cause as something other than what it actually is: a familial and sociological epidemic of ignorance, stupidity, resistance, denial, arrogance and self justifying attitudes, in those who invalidate the victim's reality in order to support and enable their own agenda and their desire for domination, power, control or simply the maintenance of the status quo. Any evidence to the contrary is simply rejected, suppressed or ignored.

Humanity needs it's scapegoats for the acting out of it's collective suppressed rage and will continue to need them for as long as we deny the abuse and fail to condemn it in all it's forms. For as long as that failure to do so is tolerated, humanity will need to keep manufacturing scapegoats who see "too" clearly, a truth which must be denied by the society, which paradoxically creates it, and then denies it's own creation!

We who are used in such ways, are often reduced to the level of objects by being discussed in the third person, by others, right in front of us, like we are not really there. We are frequently defined as less than "normal", often stupid, or unconscious, and therefore can be used for group catharsis without fear of any negative consequences for the members of the group. For they have successfully rendered us invisible to them as the human beings we actually are; human beings just like them, though admittedly, we tend to be less psychologically deaf and blind to our collective and very real, human experience.

They MUST remain blind to us to remain blind to the truth about themselves. We fulfil a need in a sick society which is unwilling and/or unable to face the truth about itself as a whole, to finally deal with it and to "let go" of it's long standing practise of scapegoating.

Until, or unless, the practise is assigned the status of a relic out of our regressive psychological past, our ongoing collective sibling rivalry will continue to destroy our world and those who dare to blame the abuser, and ruin his/her game and all this "fun" we are all obliged, especially as the victims of it, to pretend we are having.

Meanwhile, society doesn't solve anything since it isn't considered to be good form or "loyal" to the family to deal with the real cause of it. Instead, it treats the effects of it by smothering the perceptions, reactions, consciousness, and self definition of the victims, who aren't "allowed" to know, nor to say, they ARE victims. This is done by mocking, ridicule, manipulation, group pressure, threats or attempting by other means, to reduce, or deny our awareness of our own experience and the legitimate emotional reactions TO that experience.

By doing so we are reduced to a level that poses no threat to the group's delusional belief in it's own supposedly ''better'' understanding. Often, this feels like a psychological near death experience to the victim. It is like being almost invisible as the human beings that we actually are. It often appears that only those who operate in constant duplicity, "hiding" the blatantly obvious from we who "don't understand it" (and we don't) can be seen as "normal."

Are you confused?
Well, whatever we do, we are shown that we must not admit to it. If we do, we just may have that "confusion" dealt with chemically with a little medication designed to ensure that it does not show upon our faces. It seems that how "things look" in such group settings is judged to be much more important than how things really are.

"Normal" people know enough, apparently, not to look any deeper for the meaning behind it all as they may be forced to see something they would rather NOT see.

So, we are obliged to be very careful and hyper aware of the dangers around us, carefully keeping our personal truth hidden so as not to be judged to be "abnormal" by those who need us to be just that, in order to keep RIGHT ON on behaving the same way, without any sign of guilt or contrition.

The only way we will stop this is by exposing it everywhere and talking about it openly. Only the light of reason will drive the shadow of or collective abusive past away for good.