However, one person’s character flaw is not another person’s excuse to violate the relationship agreements. There is no question that we all bring deep imperfection and character flaws to our relationships. It can look like criticism about how the partner looks, how they dress, their personality traits, or how they interact relationally. It can look like accusations about unmet relational and emotional needs.įor betrayed partners, scapegoating can be particularly lethal as they try to sort out what is their responsibility in the relationship and what is not. This can look like complaints about the partner not being sexual enough or sexual in the way that the cheater prefers. In this type of cycle, cheaters emphasize and exaggerate their partner’s character defects in their own minds in order to provide a rationale for their cheating behavior.Īnother way scapegoating takes place is that the unfaithful individual will overtly blame their partner. From there it is a short leap to tell themselves that it is ok to go act out and in fact it is their spouse’s fault that they are acting out. They then tell themselves that their spouse is not empathetic or a nag or unavailable. The word scapegoating is defined by as, “the act or practice of assigning blame or failure to another, as to deflect attention or responsibility away from oneself.” The most frequent way that I see cheating clients use scapegoating is to covertly scoop blame onto their partner so that they can justify their sexual acting out to themselves.įor example, someone might pick a fight with their wife and get indignant and self-righteous in the argument. This week we are going to focus on scapegoating and coercion. Last week we looked at the straight-up lie and reality manipulation. There are four primary types of gaslighting behaviors: the straight-up lie, reality manipulation, scapegoating and coercion. This term originated from a movie made in 1944 called Gaslight where the heroine’s husband attempts to drive her insane by manipulating her reality. In last week’s post we defined gaslighting as the systematic and chronic manipulation and lying that betrayed partners experience at the hands of the cheating partner.
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