Joining the scapegoat
Last year I learned a rule that I am grateful to have in my life now. Whenever you observe someone scapegoating someone else (that is usually not there, so they can go on and ridicule and complain about them without their direct presence), the simple thing to do is to take a moment and find that part of yourself that can identify with the scapegoat and then offer it up for direct confrontation.
The person doing the scapegoating now has to articulate their dissatisfaction towards that part of you, that they see as the problem. The immediate effect is usually that the person doing the scapegoating gets slightly disarmed - it gets rid of most of the sadistic and unreasonable side to their complaining. But more interestingly, both parties now have an opportunity to explore the problem, because it is right there in the room - the part of you that identifies with the scapegoat!
There are several challenges to this strategy. One common reaction is that the person doing the scapegoating will backpedal too fast and pretend there's no problem. Pass it off as a joke - there are many ways. If you want to uproot the scapegoating, don't accept this compliant behavior and demonstratively take the person more seriously than they now do themself. Confirm that you heard them say there's really a problem here and you're curious to hear more, because you might be part of the problem.
Another common reaction, which is another way to avoid the confrontation (and scapegoating is itself a kind of conflict avoidance) is that the person will not accept that what they complained about has anything to do about you. "You're not that kind of person!" they'll say. Here it really is important that you did your work and actually found a part of yourself that can identify with the scapegoat and didn't jump in too fast. (If you went in like that, the whole thing will backfire now).
You'll have to get hold of that part of you that can identify with the scapegoat and then describe it sincerely. I think that's where the exploration between them and I usually begins. The amazing thing is that I often learn something and end up getting corrective feedback about myself. If you go into this kind of situation with the assumption that it is only the other person who needs to learn something, you're kind of scapegoating them ("they're the whole problem").
The scapegoat by definition gets to carry too much responsibility - in fact, all the responsibility - for the problem that is making the person upset. By going in and offering myself up as the part of the problem, I often find that I get to learn something. Which is very different from thinking that you're somehow helping the situation by sacrificing yourself (a very different way of identifying with the scapegoat that is strong in the Christian tradition).
A lot of people in my culture want to change the world by sacrificing themselves as the scapegoat. It is the strategy of Jesus after all. The unintended effect of that strategy is that, well, you end up identifying with Jesus. Who is also God. So the risk is you get a bit of an inflated self-perception. (Or totally deflated self-perception, which is the other side of the same coin).
The key piece of the strategy I'm exploring is exactly to undermine the logic of the scapegoat by not taking ALL the responsibility of the problem on your shoulders. It is, after all, only a part of you that can identify with the scapegoat. And since you're not the only one - the person doing the scapegoating was talking about some "other people" in the first place - you're at most part of the problem. As soon as we temper things with proportions like that, the sadistic impulse loses power.
