𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘆

Last week there was an empty chair in my Monday group. No rupture. No dramatic goodbye. Just vacancy. Within minutes the conversation curved toward X (the person who had left) — her defensiveness, her rigidity, how difficult it had been to work with her. The room felt lighter, aligned and relieved.

I let it breathe for a while. Then I said, “I am going to interrupt this blame party. I wonder if critiquing X is serving as the group’s bonding ritual.”

A few heads lifted.
“If she were sitting in that chair, would we be speaking like this?

One member leaned back and said, “But we’re just being honest. She was defensive.”

I nodded. “I’m not disputing that. I’m questioning why discussing her defensiveness is the safest thing in the room right now.”

He pushed again. “So we can’t talk about what was difficult?”

“You can,” I said gently. “But not without including yourselves. What was happening in this field that made defense necessary? Defense doesn’t happen in a vaccum.“

The temperature changed. You could feel the discomfort — not sharp, but clarifying.

Another member said quietly, “It’s easier to analyse her than to admit I was running out of patience.”

René Girard, in The Scapegoat, writes, “The scapegoat is charged with all the evils in the community.” Sometimes the scapegoat isn’t attacked — they’re “understood,” “analysed,” “processed.” The group bonds through shared diagnosis.

Process groups are especially vulnerable to this. We become skilled at feedback. We name impact, regulate tone, refine our language. Meanwhile the field remains unexamined. The hierarchy organising itself. The tempo being imposed. The competition for moral ground. The collective impatience with slower nervous systems.

If you work in groups — or lead them — here are questions worth holding:

1. When someone in your team is “difficult,” what atmosphere forms around them?
2. Who feels momentarily bonded through shared frustration?
3. What quality in them disturbs something unowned in you?
4. If that person disappeared, what developmental edge would vanish with them?
5. What would it take for the group to metabolise tension without appointing a carrier?

The empty chair last Monday was not a story about the person who left. It was a story about how swiftly intelligent groups purchase harmony by concentrating tension in one body.

Only when we shift from analysing a person to examining the field, the work becomes adult. No villains. No heroes. No one gets to stay clean.

At ACG, we are less interested in how elegantly you can give feedback and more interested in whether you can recognise your participation in what is emerging between group members. That is where real development begins — not in correcting someone’s behaviour, but in understanding the system you are co-authoring in real time.

If you like to meet in the cocreated field, my Friday group has vacancies:)