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On a recent visit to the Shidoni Foundry and Gallery in Tesuque, NM, I ran across a bronze sculpture entitled “Spirit of the Medicine Man” by Gib Singleton. It depicted a person wearing the horns and skin of a bison, clinging tenaciously to the back of a horse careering missile-like across an imagined prairie. I felt, as a psychologist, that I could relate deeply to the experience that the artist portrayed: the sometimes wild surrender a therapist makes to their patient’s experience, riding fleeing emotions with no certainty where they will lead, yet profoundly trusting that it will be a place we need to go.
This is what I and others have called a shamanic model of psychotherapy. It’s a metaphor referring to a spiritual healing process in which the healer, vessel-like, takes into themselves the patient’s harmful “demon” and renders it innocuous or, as in the above sculpture, rides its wildness and ultimately tames it, before returning it to the owner, now healed through this rebalancing. Psychotherapy, of course, is founded in secular rather than spiritual traditions and knowledge, but the metaphor is apt, as it, like shamanism, is an emotionally demanding process that, even as it is richly satisfying, can be existentially depleting. One reason why it works, though, is that both the patient and the therapist are volunteers: again like shamanism, each participant chooses the vulnerability and risk entailed in the process, the patient letting another see their darkest self and the therapist chancing failure and the emotional pain entailed in empathy. Through their mutual and agentic investment, the healer and the being healed can change the course of unwellness and create a new, more healthful state. The process is, at its heart, innately generous.
However, there is also a dark version of this dynamic: scapegoating. In it, a suffering person relies on another to process their pain, but it is not voluntary; the sufferer strives to relocate their suffering outside themselves by persistently blaming another for it, sometimes leading this blamed other to believe that the pain is actually theirs. This can happen when the original sufferer is unable to recognize or accept the pain as their own, to understand its origin within themselves, and so they cast about looking elsewhere and assign the cause to whatever external candidate which appears to them as plausible.
In families, this can look like a parent persistently blaming a child for the parent’s suffering — “My life was great until you came along” or, more subtly, “I’m so disappointed in you” — and, in some households, the entire family comes to see one person as the source of all dysfunction. This can go so far that, when a child grows up in a narrative in which they are blamed for the family’s problems, they can come to believe it and, often, take on such a role — consciously or unconsciously — and so behave in disruptive ways.
This dynamic is similar to that of the shaman in that the scapegoat becomes the vessel for the family’s demons; it’s also very different, however, in that no one in the system is volunteering. The blaming members falsely believe they are victims of the scapegoat and the scapegoat, perhaps more reasonably, sees themselves as victim of the blamers. Yet, the scapegoat has been conscripted into the role of bearing blame for all the family’s pain and “wrongness” and has been given no skill for dealing with the burden, let alone for recognizing the dynamic as such or helping the blamers to accept and process their own suffering. This conscripted shaman ends up being continually pummeled and inevitably overwhelmed by the emotional labor offloaded onto them by others who, usually through their own naivete and trauma, are blind to the injury they do.
The dynamic of scapegoating is tragic; scapegoats are abused and can end up struggling with the freight of others’ pain throughout their lives, while blamers rob themselves of the very agency they hope to gain by offloading their pain. Some people do not survive scapegoating, as the strategies to relieve themselves of others’ pain can have life-threatening costs: addictive behaviors or other behavioral and mental health issues — which have the exacerbating effect of providing blamers with further “evidence” that the scapegoat really is the problem — which can be incapacitating and even lead to death, indirectly or by suicide.
The good news about this is that folks who experience scapegoating tend to come to psychotherapy with strengths that they didn’t know they had, arising, paradoxically, from those same experiences of abuse: higher self-awareness, greater empathy, and richer understanding of interpersonal dynamics. Treatment that focuses on interrupting and breaking up the old narrative of being the problem can help the patient to recognize and take ownership of those strengths. In turn, it can become easier to set boundaries and distinguish when it’s okay to be vulnerable and when it’s more risky.
Working with folks who have been or are being scapegoated is one of the most meaningful aspects of my practice. It is a privilege for me to watch these former conscripts come into themselves, to recognize their strengths, and begin to feel the freedom to express themselves with confidence, choosing paths that can lead away from others’ burdens and toward deeply satisfying lives.
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