“We Hate Our Leader:” Countertransference and Scapegoating of Leadership

Groups tend to seek and find someone to blame. When things go wrong — or even when they're just hard — leaders often become the screen onto which a whole team projects its frustration, disappointment, and unmet needs. In mission-driven and social justice spaces especially, this dynamic runs deep, tangled up with our histories, our expectations, our tense relationship to power, and everything we wish leadership could be.

This webinar takes an honest look at what happens beneath the surface of our relationships to authority, and how naming those dynamics can create more leaderful, equitable, and collaborative movements.

We'll start by shifting our relationship to power itself: not as domination, but as transformative capacity. From there we'll explore the difference between power over, power under, and power with, and what changes when hierarchy is fixed versus rotating. We'll draw on psychodynamic frameworks including countertransference, projection, idealization and devaluation, splitting, the golden shadow; in order to understand why we scapegoat the very people we invite to lead.

We'll also name the patterns that too often go unspoken:

• Hollow prize theory — and why leadership so often feels like a trap
• Racialized and gendered expectations of emotional labor and perfectionism placed on leaders
• Parentification and the workplace-as-family dynamic that quietly harms social justice organizations
• Founder syndrome and the unwillingness to let go of power, alongside challenges with founder mental health, and the real health costs of over-accountability

Regardless of your organizational structure, this session offers an equity driven and experience-based look at why we turn on our leaders and how to build something more intentional and values driven in place of the blame.

Pricing + Scholarships

This webinar is offered at a sliding scale between $25 and $75 per person. We are not a nonprofit, we are a network of practitioners who do this work balanced with other commitments and grassroots support makes this work sustainable for us. If you would need a scholarship to be able to participate or for currency accessibility please use this form - scholarships are available upon request. The minimum that we ask all students to pay for access to a webinar is $15. Webinars are recorded so that they are available for registrants to access whenever they would like. Our Patreon supporters who pay at least $10/month receive 50% off all webinars.