So you're the Scapegoat. Now what?
Recognising the scapegoat role at work
Welcome to new subscribers resonating with my posts about workplace scapegoating on other platforms. I write about the drivers of human behaviour, conscious or not, focusing on narcissistic dynamics that play out in relationships and systems. If you’re new to this lens, start your learning journey here.
Interpersonal narcissism mirrors macro relational dynamics: citizens vs. governments, culture wars, staff vs. toxic leaders, even geopolitical conflict. Autocratic power struggles often begin as interpersonal narcissism and escalate into dark triad/tetrad patterns. This isn’t just about ruthless political figures. It plays out between friends, colleagues, families—anywhere hatred, resentment, insecurity, and envy overtake reason.
Most people find my work because they read something that finally put words to their experience. You’ve either seen the behaviours I describe or been targeted by them. You’re not just reading about dysfunction, you’re also recognising it. That clarity is vital as it helps you stop thinking you’re the problem.
There is another level after this, which is to begin analysing the role you played (often without realising it) in co-creating a dynamic and re-enacting an old pattern with someone else. This is not about blame. It’s about learning how your unconscious, conditioned responses emerge when you feel out of control, insecure, or when your perception of reality is threatened. Once you can recognise those patterns, you can take responsibility for how you’ve participated and use your agency to shift your perceptions and behaviour. This gives you the chance to break the cycle and make different choices. By stepping out of the role of victim, you move beyond the drama triangle and access a more grounded, self-aware, and strategic position, one that lets you move forward with clarity.
Many people have a hard time transitioning from the victim role to the co-creator role for a variety of reasons. Victimhood can be a powerful strategy as it helps those who have been harmed or betrayed to draw in support and access creative pathways toward justice. Remaining in the wound serves a purpose and has a certain pull. Others come to recognise that victimhood is ultimately limiting and choose to shift their life circumstances so they can examine themselves, reflect on their past thinking and actions, and begin to consciously exit the role. This isn’t about dismissing the real harm you have endured. It’s about helping you understand what to do with it once you’ve named it.
What often triggers defensiveness is the idea that someone must be the villain. But we’re all capable of being victim, persecutor, and rescuer—sometimes all at once. Perpetrators often frame themselves as victims to justify their abuse. That’s why behavioural patterns, not emotional narratives, reveal what’s actually happening. Without that lens, you can find yourself repeating the same dynamic in a different environment, unaware that the players and setting have changed but the pattern remains the same.
This is the work of hacking narcissism.
The Workplace Scapegoat
One common role is the workplace Scapegoat. You may feel victimised, and in many cases, you are. Here’s how it often unfolds:
You’re a respected team lead. A new senior leader arrives to align strategy. Before taking time to understand your work, they begin challenging your ideas, initially with subtle dismissals, followed by more direct critiques.
In private meetings, they raise concerns about team metrics. They repeat the phrase, "We’re in the red," without offering context or acknowledging shared accountability. The implication is quiet but clear: you are to blame.
You’re moved into a role with less authority. Meetings disappear. Your team is reassigned to other managers. You’re still in the organisation but your influence fades.
Colleagues interact with you as if nothing’s changed, but they stop asking for your input. Conversations feel shallow. You can’t tell if they notice what’s happening or are deliberately avoiding it.
Your boss grows distant, rerouting key decisions through others just below her. You’re not told you’ve failed, just slowly pushed out of relevance.
Nothing is said or official, but everything’s different.
You start asking yourself the question that’s hard to admit: Am I the scapegoat?
What is the Scapegoat?
The scapegoat is a term that originates from an ancient ritual in which a goat symbolically took on the sins of a community and was then driven out into the wilderness, thereby purging the group of its perceived wrongdoings. The scapegoat serves a sacrificial function to assure group cohesion.
Symbolically, the scapegoat is the symbol of accountability-averse communities. It occurs when the true source of anger goes unpunished, and people shift their aggression elsewhere1. It is the darkness that a group refuses to integrate by avoiding the underlying source of the transgression or protecting it. The scapegoat becomes the vessel through which the group attempts to purify itself by projection.
In a modern workplace or family, a scapegoat is someone unfairly blamed for problems, mistakes, or conflict. They are used to avoid accountability or confront uncomfortable truths. They absorb not the sins of the group, but its stress, dysfunction, and unspoken tension. They become the lightning rod for everything unresolvable in the system. It destroys the vessel instead of transforming the system.
This role often serves to maintain the status quo or deflect attention away from deeper dysfunction. The scapegoat is frequently singled out as the problem, regardless of their actual behaviour or contributions.
Why scapegoating happens
Scapegoating arises from a mix of individual traits, group behaviour, and organisational culture, rather than from a single catalyst. Recognising these patterns can help mitigate the risk of becoming or perpetuating scapegoating in the workplace.
Many people assume that being scapegoated is the result of personal conflict or communication breakdown. But more often, it is a structural outcome of working within a fragile system—one that perceives discomfort as a threat rather than a signal. Fragile systems prioritise control, emotional containment, and assimilation. They do not metabolise difference well. Insight, care, or principled dissent is seen as disruption, rather than the provision of valuable input.
In contrast, adaptive systems are resilient. They can tolerate discomfort and conflict without ejecting the person who raised it. These systems expect learning, evolution, and even friction as part of maintaining integrity. The difference is how a system processes stress and how it influences people's behaviour.
This is usually the place where I provide a list of conditions that lead to scapegoating. All this does is highlight the possible triggers that set off the workplace immune response but does nothing to stop it. Scapegoating in any workplace, group, community, or gathering of people is unacceptable. It serves to cover up dysfunction tied to something or someone powerful and blocks accountability. It reinforces group dysfunction and toxicity, and does nothing to improve the conditions that impact everyone, except for those protected by it.
The simple reason someone becomes a scapegoat is because who they are or what they do threatens a power structure in a system that cannot tolerate unplanned or unauthorised disruption.
Anyone can become a scapegoat, but those who have played the role before are more likely to be cast into it again.
The rest of the article describes workplace conditions that enable scapegoating, how to exit the role, and what not to do. Upgrade your subscription for full access.