Everyone has challenging moments or days. When those moments stretch into days, you start to wonder if this challenge is your new normal and not just a phase. Some people are great at asking for help, even if it’s just a sounding board session with a trusted friend. Others find it harder to ask for help and instead intellectualise their challenge until it makes sense to them. It’s an effective way of deluding yourself that you’re in control when nothing has changed except your feelings about the situation.
The feelings get sidelined by the dominant and extremely compelling stories we tell ourselves and others about the situation. This is one of the weird, wonderful, and worrisome ways our ego defences work to avoid confronting tough truths and resist the change that is foisted upon us by the presence of a challenging situation. These are the same reflexes we see in interpersonal narcissism, where control and appearances matter more than truth. The status game here is composure at all costs.
I’ve noticed another pattern: pain disguised as offers of connection. It often sounds like these innocent expressions:
“You’ve been on my mind and I wanted to see how you’re doing.”
“Your work really resonates. I’d love to connect with you.”
“It’s been a while, let’s catch up.”
You might be thinking this is another case of Nathalie looking for things to unpack in non-things. I write about behaviour that intrigues me when they occur a few times in slightly absurd ways. When something grabs my attention because of its mild absurdity, I assume it’s worth exploring more deeply. That’s how I work, and so far it has paid off and helped many people make sense of things they can’t describe but sense something’s not quite right.
I recently received a string of private messages on business networking platforms that seem innocent. They’re not the covert envy-fuelled messages I’ve written about before. These are appreciation messages about my posts on the Scapegoating Playbook at Work, paired with requests to meet virtually and connect. What they share in common is that they come from high status helping professionals
They include organisational psychologists, learning and development leaders, psychiatrists, occupational health specialists, HR directors, governance and risk consultants, and lawyers, often from prestigious companies.
I’ve also had many other professionals, including CEOs, reach out to me to share their stories of scapegoating privately and book sessions with me. So this is not about status or reluctance to reveal too much before a proper introduction.