The Scapegoat Was Never the Problem

Were you the “difficult one” in your family? The too-sensitive one, the one who asked the questions nobody wanted asked, the one who always seemed to be the problem? This episode is for you.In this episode, Dr. David Schlosz looks at the scapegoat: the person a family, workplace, or community picks to carry what it can’t face in itself. Starting from the ancient ritual of the goat sent into the wilderness, Davo explains how scapegoating works and why the person chosen is so often the most perceptive one in the room. He also looks at how a role handed to us in childhood can slowly harden into who we believe we are.Drawing on the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), family systems theory, relational-cultural theory, and the work of thinkers like Murray Bowen, René Girard, Ronald Fairbairn, and Jean Baker Miller, this episode explores:Why the “identified patient” in a family is often carrying the family’s pain, not causing itHow self-blame works as a child’s survival intelligenceThe two sides of the scapegoat identity: collapsing into shame, or bracing against itWhy setting the role down involves grief, and why families often push back when you stop playing your partWhat therapists and group leaders need to watch for in the roomHow one witness can stop the whole thing, and why scapegoating is Ubuntu turned inside outThe episode closes with a gentle guided practice, “Setting Down What Was Never Yours,” and a blessing for the part of you still out in the wilderness.You were never the storm. You were where it landed.This episode is educational and is not a substitute for therapy. It touches on family rejection and blame, so please listen with care. If you’re in crisis in the US, call or text 988. Please don’t do the guided practice while driving.Keep becoming.

One pound for a skull in good order. In a Cape Town museum, Dr. David Schlosz stands in front of a 1923 letter pricing human remains and faces how much he was never taught.Sarah Baartman was a Khoekhoe woman from the Gamtoos Valley. She was taken to London in 1810 and put on display, then exhibited in Paris, then dissected after her death, and her remains stayed on show in a French museum for generations. In 2002, one hundred and ninety two years after she left, she was carried home and buried on a hill above Hankey, in the valley where she was born.In this episode, David tells her story through Homecoming: Ancestral Returns, Museum Reckonings, and the Future of Care, an exhibition at the Iziko South African Museum made by Khoi and San descendants. It fills the room that once held the museum’s Bushman Diorama. From there, the episode widens from one woman to the system that measured, classified, and priced a people. Then it turns to what this asks of us now.As a white South African, David speaks openly about his own positionality and about the comfortable not-knowing he grew up inside. He comes back again and again to the people whose story this is.In this episode, we explore:Sarah Baartman’s life, death, and return, told with dignity and without recreating the gazeHow museums, archives, and science built “controlling images” that justified harmShame as something done to a people and then lived as if it were personalWhat helping professionals inherit from the disciplines that built race scienceWitness, not looking away, as the repair for a harmful gazeUbuntu, and what a homecoming means for descendants and for the rest of usA guided practice: Soft Eyes, Steady FeetContent note: This episode discusses colonial violence, racism, the sexualized public display of a woman’s body, grave robbing, and human remains held in museums. It quotes some colonial terms in the way the archive used them. If you are Khoi, San, Nama, Griqua, or Coloured, or you descend from any people who were measured and named this way, please listen in whatever way your body needs. Use the chapters below to skip ahead or come back later.With gratitude to Joniff Cleophas (The Observed), Lukretia Booysen (Point of View), and the descendant artists of Homecoming at the Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town. Historian Yvette Abrahams, for insisting that Sarah be understood as a full human being. The late Diana Ferrus (1953 to 2026), whose poem I’ve Come to Take You Home helped bring Sarah home. Please read it in her own words, in her collection of the same name.Further readingAbrahams, Y. (2000). Colonialism, dysfunction and dysjuncture: The historiography of Sarah Bartmann [Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town].Crais, C., & Scully, P. (2009). Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A ghost story and a biography. Princeton University Press.Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery. Basic Books.Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands. Central Recovery Press.If you need support: This podcast is education and reflection, not therapy. In the US, call or text 988. In South Africa, contact SADAG at 0800 567 567. Elsewhere, please reach out to a local crisis line or a counselor you trust.Project I Am is hosted by Dr. David Schlosz , psychotherapist and counselor educator. I am because you are.Keep becoming.

There's a moment where someone stops being a person to you and becomes a situation: a difficult client, a high-maintenance friend, a problem your partner needs to solve. And there's a quieter, more common version of that same moment: where you stop being a person to yourself, and become a body to manage, a performance to monitor, a project that should be doing better by now.In this episode, Dr. David Schlosz explores intersubjectivity, the practice of meeting another person, or yourself, as a full presence rather than an object to be managed. Drawing on Martin Buber's I-Thou / I-It framework, Donald Winnicott's false self, Murray Bowen's differentiation of self, and Carl Rogers' core conditions for change, this episode walks through what objectification actually looks like, why we do it, what it costs us, what it gives us, how culture trains us into it, and, most importantly, how we practice our way back out.

This episode is a little different. No teaching, no notes to take. Just twenty minutes of guided practice, for you.Most of us learned early how to leave ourselves. How to get smaller, quieter, more acceptable. That wasn't weakness. You were not broken, you were adapting. But what was learned for survival can be unlearned in safety, and this practice is where we begin.Through slow, spacious affirmations, you'll practice staying with yourself in three places where self-abandonment likes to hide: in the moment you feel afraid, in the moment you're seen, and in the quiet afterward, when the room empties and the second-guessing begins. That drive-home voice that asks "was that really okay?" This one is for it.A note on listening: this practice invites your eyes to soften and your attention to turn inward, so please don't listen while driving. Save it for a moment when the time is yours.And don't forget to save it. This episode is built to be returned to. It works best the more familiar it becomes, so come home to it as often as you like.Keep becoming.

What if the two things you've been told to choose between: accepting yourself as you are, and changing, were never actually in conflict?In this episode, I sit down with my longtime colleague and friend Megan Yale, LPC-S, LMFT-S, for a conversation about Dialectical Behavior Therapy that goes far beyond the acronym. Megan trained intensively in DBT at the University of Washington and with its creator, Marsha Linehan, and she tells the origin story most people never hear: how Linehan tried a change-only approach and it failed, tried an acceptance-only approach and it failed, and then built a therapy on the radical idea that two opposite things can be true at the same time.We explore what that dialectic looks like in real life, why DBT is not just for any one diagnosis, and why the goal was never to get rid of emotions but to build a pause between feeling and action. Megan also shares two distress tolerance skills you can practice today (STOP and TIPP), and we wander into her other love, sandtray therapy, where the inner world gets built in miniature and people come face to face with their own truth.Whether you're doing your own healing work or sitting in the other chair as a helper, this conversation holds one message at its center: struggling doesn't mean you're broken. Sometimes you were just never given the skills.Connect with Megan: inlinemind.com where feelings are understood and skills take shape. Megan sees clients online and in person in the greater Austin area and offers Sandtray therapy training for clinicians.

We like to believe we see ourselves and others clearly. Yet under stress, uncertainty, shame, or relational threat, the mind often reaches for simpler conclusions: good or bad, safe or dangerous, success or failure, worthy or unworthy.In this episode of Project I Am, Dr. David J. Schlosz explores all-or-nothing thinking not merely as a cognitive distortion, but as a survival strategy. Binary labels can create temporary certainty and protect us from disappointment, ambiguity, and grief. Yet they also flatten our humanity, turning behaviors into identities and complicated people into fixed categories.Drawing from psychological research, contemporary culture, and the wisdom of poets including John Keats, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, this episode invites us to make room for a wider truth, one that allows for accountability without shame, compassion without compliance, and firm boundaries without denying another person’s humanity.Perhaps healing does not require us to decide whether we are good or bad. Perhaps it asks us to become spacious enough to recognize that we are complex, unfinished, accountable, and still becoming.

Burnout is often described as the consequence of doing too much for too long. But sometimes, exhaustion is also the result of repeatedly leaving ourselves behind.In this episode of Project I Am, Dr. David Schlosz explores the idea that burnout, in many cases, is prolonged self-betrayal. This is not an accusation or a suggestion of moral failure. It is an invitation to become curious about the adaptations that once helped us remain safe, useful, successful, or connected, but may now be asking us to disappear.Through reflection, personal storytelling, and a guided somatic practice, this episode examines the distance that can develop between the life we perform and the truth our body is carrying. It explores resentment, exhaustion, boundaries, belonging, and the protective parts of us that learned to preserve connection by silencing our own needs.Recovery may require more than rest. It may ask us to recognize what is no longer sustainable, repair the relationship we have with ourselves, and reorient our lives around greater honesty and alignment.Perhaps healing begins with a simple promise: I will not abandon myself.

What happens after you do the brave thing?You send the proposal, share the idea, apply for the position, set the boundary, or finally allow yourself to be seen. For a moment, it feels like expansion. Then the adrenaline fades, doubt rushes in, and a familiar voice asks, “Who do you think you are?”In this episode of Project I Am, I share a recent experience of putting something into the world and the internal collapse that followed. Together, we explore why courage can be followed by contraction, why being perceived can feel so vulnerable, and how growth may awaken old fears about criticism, failure, success, belonging, and the relationships we could disrupt by becoming more fully ourselves.We also examine the difference between fear and wisdom, between disappearing and setting a healthy boundary, and between protecting ourselves and abandoning ourselves. Rather than treating contraction as proof that we made a mistake, what if we approached it as a protective response deserving curiosity and compassion but not always authority?Perhaps we do not need to eliminate fear before moving forward. Perhaps a different kind of confidence becomes possible: not the certainty that nothing difficult will happen, but the trust that we will remain in relationship with ourselves when it does.

Nobody dreams bigger than their relationship with themselves will allow. In this episode, Dr. David Schlosz explores why the size of our dreams is a measure not of imagination but of self-concept, the quiet, adaptive answer we carry to the question who am I allowed to be? Drawing on NARM's insight that we disconnect from ourselves to stay connected to others, Carl Rogers' conditions of worth, the possible-selves research of Markus and Nurius, Bandura's work on self-efficacy, and Snyder's hope theory, this episode reframes small dreaming as an old act of protection and shows where present-moment agency lives. For clinicians: what it means to hold a client's possibility in trust until their self-concept can hold it themselves. For everyone: a guided somatic practice called Breathing Room, making a quarter-inch more space in the self.Referenced (as attributed paraphrase): Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander, Laurence Heller (NARM), Carl Rogers, Hazel Markus & Paula Nurius, Daphna Oyserman, Albert Bandura, C.R. Snyder, Judith Herman, D.W. Winnicott, Murray Bowen, Parker Palmer, Rilke, Desmond Tutu (Ubuntu).

What if the most important thing a therapist brings into the room isn't a technique, intervention, or perfectly timed question, but themselves?In this deeply personal conversation, I sit down with licensed marriage and family therapist Kim Fry to explore how our relationship with ourselves shapes every relationship we have with others. Together we talk about the transformative power of curiosity, why therapists don't heal people by fixing them, and how our own unresolved stories inevitably show up in the therapy room.Kim shares the profound story of a single voicemail from her own therapist that forever changed her relationship with anger, authenticity, and what it means to truly be seen. From there, our conversation unfolds into an exploration of presence, supervision, vulnerability, and why healing begins when we stop performing and start showing up as fully human.Whether you're a therapist, helping professional, or simply someone longing to live more authentically, this episode is an invitation to consider a different question:What if your greatest gift to another person is not having the answers—but being fully present with them?In this episode, we explore:Why the therapist's relationship with themselves matters more than any interventionHow curiosity creates the conditions for healingThe difference between fixing someone and being with someoneWhat anger can teach us about ourselvesWhy authenticity is often our greatest challenge, and our greatest giftHow therapists can cultivate a more sustainable and deeply human practice