Case Vignette: As a child, I was born into a U.S. Foreign Service family and lived in Europe until my early teens. At one point, we were stationed in Stockholm, Sweden and I attended the French School there. I joined at mid-point during the year, which is always a difficult time for any child. Groups have already been formed, leaders have emerged etc. So one is by force the odd-person out. My family had been in Geneva, Switzerland for almost ten years and this was a big change in culture for me. I was still processing the loss of my own cohort community and trying to adjust to a new culture. I really didn't need to run into a bully at that point in time. But I did.
There are certain moments during the human development phases that are critical. The brain's neurological structures are changing, new neural nets are being formed and these are easy times for psychological accidents to happen. Depending on the strength of the family and the emotional safety of the child, these can be periods of positive formation or, conversely, very destructive patterns of thinking and being can take hold. For me, I was ten and vulnerable. Our family life had become destabilized and there was little time for me and my issues. I also received extremely negative images of my "self" from my mother at that time. My self-image and my sense of self-worth were just coming into being and had not crystallized. I had not even begun to develop a working model of who I was then. Children and teenagers typically look to their environments for clues of who they are and who they want to become. Because I was not welcomed into the class community and was targeted by the group leader as an outsider, I quickly became the victim. In retrospect and in view of the way in which this scenario has repeated itself in my life over and over again throughout the years, I have come to believe that I stamped the archetype of the Scapegoat onto my psyche at that time and continued to project it throughout my life.
The fact that my father was attacked by Joseph McCarthy in his attempt to purge the U.S. State Department of communists (which my father was not) further weakened our family structure and gave the group leader more fodder to throw at me in the schoolyard. We got back to the U.S. when I was about fifteen and I entered a culture that, to me, was more akin to Mars than anything I had seen so far on Earth. The State Department had no re-entry program established for its "Third Culture Kids" at that time so we were on our own to cope. I went further underground and tried to invoke the cloak as much as possible while keeping away from peer groups, their leaders and all seemingly powerful persons. I lived overseas professionally after that, married a Moslem diplomat and sank further into victimhood. Once I returned to the States, I found myself running scared trying to raise two children with no child support and no post-secondary education. I was always terrified of losing my job, not being able to care for my family, feeling inferior to everyone around me and trying to stay out of site as much as I could.
This led, of course, not only to my holding positions that were completely detached from any team (what in human systems dynamics we refer to as un-coupled) but also to my being the person who seemed to always "hold the darkness" in the organization. There is always someone designated to do that, to be the scapegoat.
Now, after having completed almost three degrees and having become a clinician, coach and organizational systems professional, I can look back and clearly understand what I and circumstances did to myself. I can recognize my own achievements, my own excellence and celebrate the painful road I have traveled. It's taken so many decades to get here and my hope is that in sharing with like-experienced others we can develop ways of lifting the stigmata of the workplace scapegoat. So much for my story.
As a psychodynamically trained clinician, I tend to look at character development through an attachment lens. For those who are not familiar with the concept of attachment, Holmes (2001) writes that the basis of attachment theory is identification, which, as Freud held, is formed by an active baby creating both an internal and an external world from the influences presented to him or her. Again going back to Holmes, a sense of self arises out of the capacity to shape these influences into a coherent whole. This also forms the basis of the self-other template that acts as a model for subsequent relationships where the inner world is comprised of good and bad internalized objects and in which the individual may identify with either end of the spectrum (i.e. passive/active, receiver/doer, victim/abuser).
This suggests that when attachment development is failed or compromised in childhood it often leads to vulnerabilities or fisssures in the adult emotional structure. Holmes states that "attachment security maintains the differentiation of the self and the other; when it fails, it leads to psychological illness. So, we have a psychological immune system that can be strengthened or weakened throughout our lives just as our physical immune system can be.
A geologist turned psychoanalyst, Michael Balint had a word for this: he called it the Basic Fault (1968). The geological metaphor of the fault describes "a sudden irregularity which in normal circumstances might lie hidden but, if strains and stresses occur, may lead to a break, profoundly disturbing the overall structure." This fault can be thought of as a fissure if one likes that, when invoked, can cause a flooding of stress hormones and a collapse of one's sense of self, even of one's cognitive hold on the self. It's the equivalent of a psychological earthquake. Bullying, particulary (for me anyway) the use of humiliation, can and does set this off. There is big difference between humiliating, shaming and embarassing. I'll get to these and their effects in a later post. Back to Balint.
Balint's theory flows into the psychological immune systems model (Holmes) which when well regulated, increases the chances of maintaining the integrity and security of the self. This can be seen in terms of attachment. When the psychological immune system is threatened, the basic fault appears to be activated. Unless a person possesses what Balint refers to as a "reliable and intelligent ego that is able to take in words...[then] the ego is able to perform what Freud called 'working through'," a solid working model of the self will fail to form. When that happens, the ego structure will not be able to withstand and contain the tensions caused by internalization without breaking down and without resulting to a different type of defense--which may be called externalization--such as, for example, acting-out, projection, confusion, denial, depersonalization [or what I refer to as 'invoking the cloak' and 'going underground']." I would also add the defense mechanisms, triggered by the limbic system, can take on the form of one of the three "fs": fight, freeze, flee.
Those of us who practice staying away from these tensions (invoking the cloak) to protect ourselves from fissuring tend to the freeze or flight response. Others, thinking about the bullying literature, tend to move toward the fight response, which has multiple modes of external manifestation. The more I read these theories and look into my own internal mirrors, the more I believe that these issues need to be deeply explored in relationship to the workplace. We are no longer in a time when the "command and control" style of leadership can work, where bullies can reign. We are living in a four-generational workplace with a quickly rising generation of Millennials who are unlike anything the world of work has ever seen. I believe it is more than time we looked at workplace interrelationships, team structuring, and leader formation in entirely different ways--ones that consider employees through humanistic lenses and focus on allowing the whole person to come into the workplace in fullness and safety.
References
Holmes, J. (2001). The search for the secure base: Attachment theory and psychotherapy. NY: Brunner-Routledge, Inc.
Mills, J. (2005). Treating attachment pathology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
