Families & Systems

The Container

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  3 min read

Some families, offices, and churches seem to need a problem person. When the current one finally leaves, a new one appears within the year, and the names change while the complaints do not: she is too sensitive, he is not a team player, she has an attitude, he stirs things up. Everyone agrees that if this one person would simply settle down, everything would be fine.

It is worth noting that the position is never advertised and is never vacant for long. No family posts an opening for the person who ruins Thanksgiving. No office circulates a job description for the employee everybody agrees is the reason morale is down. And yet the role is filled with remarkable efficiency, usually within a year, and almost always by someone who did not apply.

Equilibrium is not health

Families and organizations tend toward equilibrium — predictability, where everyone knows the rules, including the unspoken ones. A group can be remarkably stable and remarkably unwell at the same time, because the stability is being purchased by someone. One of the earliest studies of this described how a family achieves a kind of unity by scapegoating a member, usually a child, who becomes the visible embodiment of conflicts the parents cannot face in themselves or with each other. The child does not create the tension. The child receives it — and because the tension now has a location, everyone else can carry on as though it were about her.

The sentence that reverses a verdict

The scapegoat is frequently not the most difficult person in the group. Very often she is the one who said the unsayable thing out loud — and was handed the shame of the whole system for doing it.

If you have been the identified problem in a family, a workplace, or a church, you may have assumed the role found you because something really is wrong with you. Sometimes what actually happened is that you noticed, or asked, or declined to laugh at the third joke, and the group needed the discomfort you created to belong to you rather than to it.

A test instead of a rule

Sometimes the difficult person really is difficult, and saying so is accuracy rather than scapegoating. So use the test a clinician would use: does removing the identified problem actually resolve the dysfunction? If the difficult employee leaves and the department becomes healthy, the difficulty was where everyone thought it was. If the difficult employee leaves and, within a year, someone else has quietly become the new problem — same complaints, different name — then the role was never about the person. It was a position in the system, and it has simply been refilled.

The oldest picture of this

The word scapegoat comes from a ritual in Leviticus. On the Day of Atonement, two goats were chosen; over the head of the second, the priest confessed the iniquities of the people and sent the animal away carrying them. What is striking about that ritual is its honesty. Everyone knew exactly what was happening. The sins were confessed out loud, and they belonged to the people confessing them. Nobody pretended the goat had done anything wrong.

That is precisely what does not happen in families, offices, and churches. The transfer still occurs — but it is denied, and the person carrying it is told the weight is her own. The ancient ritual was more honest than the modern arrangement, because it did not slander the goat.