Listen to thisReggie is our scapegoat. Well, okay, maybe not “ours” as in “belonging to the team” (although some days I wondered about that) but ours, as in “the group’s scapegoat”. Before him it was Alex, and before that it was ... Susan, I think. We always seem to have a scapegoat in the group, which is why, perhaps, I sometimes wonder whose needs the scapegoat is meeting. His, theirs, ours, all of them?
For sure, he’s meeting his own needs. We all know that all behaviour serves to meet a need and so some need of his must be getting met by playing out this role – which he does so well. He’s the one the group is always dumping on – and god knows he gives them enough reasons. Like the time he plugged up the shower drains, or the way he always rushes to take the best piece of cake, or the way in which he waits until the last minute to wash so that he spends a good part of the day wandering around smelling a little like the truck that comes to collect the wastes from the neighbourhood. And he is always the one messing up the basketball game, or knocking something.
There’s no question that he gets a lot of attention. And there’s also no question that we haven’t been able to help him find a better way. It does keep him connected and it gives him a role, a place that no one else challenges. And it sure does cause us to spend a lot of time with him.
We do spend a lot of time with him. Intervening with him, getting in between him and the other kids, talking with him, talking about him, wondering why he isn’t giving up this behaviour. Like I’m doing right now. I don’t write about the other kids, so why am I writing about him? What a gift he is giving me. If I didn’t have him to write about I might be stuck here with nothing to say.
Take our team meeting as another example. We always end up talking about Reggie. How he “sets himself up"; how he’s “obviously getting something out of it"; how he’s “not making any progress". We’ll start out talking about, oh, John for example, and within a few minutes we are talking about how he is “picking on Reggie” and then we’ll spend more time talking about how Reggie sets himself up to be picked on than about John. In the end we’ll make some quick decision about John because we've spent all our time talking about Reggie and then when things are not going well with John and the rest of the kids, we’ll talk about how it’s because we don’t have time. “Reggie takes all our time”, we complain. Sound familiar?
I’ve had the opportunity to be both the scapegoat and the scapegoat-er in my life. So I know the benefits of both roles: how your own needs get met by being the scapegoat, and how they also get met by being the scapegoat-er. Having someone to pick on, someone who draws attention away from yourself, someone to take the heat, these are all fine things when you want to feel a little safer yourself. When you want the focus to be someplace else or when you want someone else to “take the blame”.
Like in our team meetings?
I wonder.
