The Scapegoat
You may have learned that when something goes wrong the fault is probably yours, that anger at the people who hurt you is dangerous or disloyal, and that the safest place to put it is back on yourself. So the anger turned inward and became shame: not "I did something bad" but "I am bad". It might start with noticing the next time you blame yourself first, and asking, before you agree, whose anger this actually is. Shame is often anger that never had a safe place to land. Handed back to where it belongs, it stops being a verdict on who you are.
Traditionally echoed in the scapegoat of the Hebrew Bible, sent out into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement carrying the wrongs of the whole community, and in the pharmakos of ancient Greece, the outcast driven from the city in times of crisis so that everyone else could feel clean.
Whose anger, or whose shame, have you been carrying as if it were your own?
- Area of life
- Death, transformation and what’s hidden
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