Der Fall gegen das Opfer-Sein – oder vielleicht genauer gesagt – eine Meditation darüber

Dear friends, clients, colleagues, and readers,

Last month's newsletter ended with a question I asked you to sit with:

What would you do, what would you say, what would you attempt, if you no longer needed perfection first?

Did you? (sit with it?). If so, please don’t hesitate to share what came up in the comments or send a message.

I also promised that this month, I would look at what happens when, instead of moving through our imperfections and finding our way back to contribution, we get stuck in the story of what was done to us. The seduction, and the real cost, of victimhood.

This is that conversation.

I want to start with a few stories. They are all real in essence, and all transformed enough that no one can be identified. If you recognize something familiar in them, it is because these patterns are more common than we like to admit.

STORY 1

The first story is about a brother and a sister whose aging father is seriously ill and no longer able to manage his life on his own.

The brother lives nearby. He is the one handling the appointments, the paperwork, the endless logistics, and the emotional strain of watching a parent decline. He is exhausted, stretched thin, and increasingly resentful. He still has a full life with a job, a family, and many obligations.

The sister lives a few hours away. Over the past years, she has become deeply immersed in a world of spiritual development. Retreats, workshops, healing practices, long conversations about alignment and personal growth. Her calendar is full of commitments that, in her words, she cannot move without disrupting something essential.

She comes to visit her dad occasionally. When she does, she is present for a few hours, caring even, and then she leaves because she has something scheduled that she “really cannot miss.”

It is very hard not to react to that with a simple, almost visceral question.

“Really? You cannot miss it?”

Because … someone is missing you here.

Her brother is left not only with the practical burden, but with the quiet, growing resentment and anger that comes from feeling abandoned while someone else speaks the language of self-care and inner work.

STORY 2

The second story is more difficult.

It is about a woman whose life has been marked by a series of extremes. For years, alcohol and drugs dominated everything. After a serious health scare, she stopped these addictions, but what followed was not so much recovery as replacement. Intense wellness routines, spiritual practices, substances presented as tools for healing and expansion. Always something new, always something that promised relief and delivered escape.

What has remained constant is something underneath all of it. A deep conviction that she has been wronged by life, that she has not been seen, not been understood, not been given what she needed as a child … or ever.

She talks about her suffering often, and parts of it are undeniably real. At the same time, she can be extraordinarily harsh with the people closest to her. Her children have learned to walk on eggshells to avoid awakening the bully. Her wife, after twenty-five years of trying to hold things together, has finally left.

The situation is obviously heartbreaking. It is also, for those who have lived inside it, deeply traumatizing.

The question on everyone’s minds, even if no one says it out loud, is:

How long can original suffering justify ongoing behavior that destroys everyone else along the way?

STORY 3

The third story comes from my coaching practice.

A client describes his life as a series of situations in which he ends up with people who mistreat him. A controlling boss. A partner who does not respect him. Friends and colleagues who take advantage of him.

He is aware that this is a pattern. He can trace it back to earlier experiences. He even says, at times, “I keep putting myself in these situations.” He also alludes to narcissism.

And yet, when he is in those various relationships, the dominant experience is still that things are being “done zu him”. That he has very little power to change what is happening.

The frustration, for those around him, is not only that he is suffering. It is that he seems unable to step out of the pattern, even when he can see it. And that he keeps complaining about it.

STORY 4

The fourth story comes from a heart-wrenching conversation I had a while back with a colleague in the parent coaching field.

She told me about her teenage son, who has been pushing every boundary imaginable. There are girls and boys, drugs, disappearing for hours without warning (sometimes even days), coming home late or not at all, not going to school, constant violent oppositional conflict. The situation has escalated to the point where the entire household revolves around crisis management.

At one point, she said to me “I never thought I would feel this way, but there are moments when I just want to quit. I actually catch myself thinking about what it would be like to walk out the door and not come back.”

This is not someone disengaged from her child. This is someone who has been trying, for years, to hold things together. Setting limits, having conversations, seeking help, staying present in ways that are emotionally and physically exhausting.

And yet, from the son’s perspective, the story sounds very different. The parents are controlling. They don’t understand him. They are making his life unbearable.

These stories are different, but they share something is common. 
A posture that looks like this:

I CAN'T

I can’t … because of what happened to me.
I can’t … because of what is happening to me now.
I can’t … because it is too much, too hard, too overwhelming.

When I am feeling particularly patient, I can see the pain behind it. When I am not, I call it something else: the “woe me” club.

There is a real cost to this way of being. Not only for the person who stays in it, but for everyone around them who ends up carrying what they leave behind.

So where is the line?

Between pain and responsibility.
Between compassion and accountability.
Between understanding someone… and expecting them to show up?

I have been sitting with that question for a while now.

And the more I look at it, the more complicated it becomes.

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I want to be extra careful here because there are people who are truly victims. Too many, actually. Children who are abused. People who are trapped in violent or coercive situations. Individuals who are subjected to injustice in ways that are not within their control.

That is not what I am talking about.

What I am exploring here is something more ambiguous: situations in which someone experiences themselves as a victim and, consciously or not, remains in that position in a way that keeps them from acting, from taking responsibility, or from contributing.

THE CONNUNDRUM

The difficulty is that the line between feeling like a powerless victim and as a result not engaging in responsible behavior is not always clear. At what point does suffering become a stance that understandably holds a person in place? At what point does empathy for someone’s pain begin to coexist with the sense that something else is also required of them?

I am not entirely comfortable drawing that line, and yet most of us recognize the moment when something in us reacts and says, this does not feel right.

And then there is another other side to this question that I find at least as hard to sit with: in many of these situations, there are also people who are showing up. People who are taking responsibility, carrying what needs to be carried, and stepping in because someone has to. They are often the invisible ones, but they are the ones holding things together.

Over time, that takes a toll.

When one person consistently remains in “I can’t,” mode it does not mean that nothing gets done. It usually means that someone else does more. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a great deal more. And that imbalance accumulates. It’s a little bit like in a U-Tube manometer:

What makes it more complicated is that, even when the imbalance feels obvious, there is very little we can actually do to force a change. We cannot make another person take responsibility for their life. We cannot push someone out of discouragement if they are not ready. We cannot create courage for them.

So we are left working within a narrower space than we might like.

SOME STRATEGIES

* We can start by saying what is true for us, even when it feels uncomfortable to do so. That might look like the brother in the first story telling his sister, plainly and without attack, “I cannot keep doing this alone. I need you to take on specific responsibilities, not just visit when it works for you.” It does not guarantee a change, but it makes the reality visible.

* We can name what we see and what is needed, rather than continuing to absorb the impact silently. In the second story, that might have meant someone in that family saying, at some point, “Your pain is real, but the way you are treating us is not something we can continue to live with.” Not as a punishment, but as a line that defines what is acceptable.

* We can ask for help more directly than feels comfortable. Not hinting, not hoping the other person will notice, but actually asking. In the fourth story, it might mean that parent reaching out and saying, “I cannot hold this by myself anymore. I need support, whether that is professional help, family involvement, or a change in how we are handling this situation.”

* We can also continue to show up in ways that align with who we want to be, without letting the other person’s behavior dictate ours. The client in the third story may not be able to change others immediately, but he can begin to make different choices about where he stays, what he tolerates, and when he leaves.

* And we can pay close attention to our own limits, because stepping in again and again without boundaries has a way of slowly turning into losing ourselves. At some point, showing up for someone else has to include showing up for ourselves as well.

None of these strategies guarantee that the other person will change. They don’t. But they do change our position in the situation. And sometimes, that is the only part that is actually within our control.

Beyond that, there is often a point where we have to allow the other person to find their own way, or not, in their own time, even when that is difficult to watch.

THE ADLERIAN LENSE

If we look at these situations through an Adlerian lens, a different understanding becomes available. Instead of focusing on victimhood, Adler would have talked about discouragement.

At some point, each of these individuals has come to believe that they cannot meet the demands of life. That they are not capable, not sufficient, not able to face what is in front of them. It’s a belief … and it’s also a choice. Which is what makes this so complicated.

The behaviors we see, withdrawal, blame, avoidance, self-absorption, are ways of protecting themselves from that conclusion. They make sense. And … they create consequences.

Adler’s answer to discouragement was not judgment, but encouragement. Not reassurance, not praise, but the slow process of helping someone rediscover their capacity to act. To take one step, then another, back into participation. But even there, the decision ultimately belongs to the individual. Each person has to decide whether they are willing to move, however slightly, from “I can’t” to something else.

CONCLUSION

This brings me back, in a different way, to last month’s question: What would you do if you no longer needed to get it right first?

Perhaps the companion question this month is this:

Where, in your life have you stepped out of participation …
and what would it take to step back in?

And if you find yourself on the other side of that dynamic, carrying more than your fair share, another question may be just as important:

What do you need to continue showing up without losing yourself in the process?

As I said, I do not think this is a problem with a clean solution. It feels more like a tension we each have to navigate, again and again, between compassion and expectation, between understanding and action, between self-protection and contribution.

But if there is one thing that seems clear to me, it is this: at some point, a life fully lived asks us to step out of “I can’t.”

And that step, however small, is always an act of courage.

Here’s Portia Nelson’s Autobiography in Five Short Chapters for those of you who would like a little practice help to get out of “I can’t” and into “I can”.

And … If you need to SHAKE [your “I can’t] OUT here is a song to help you:

May this reflection help you – or someone you know – move from the under-functioning of “I can’t” to … another street.

A FEW RESOURCES ON THIS TOPIC

FILM REFERENCES

• Good Will Hunting
• Silver Linings Playbook

READ MORE: BLOGS/ESSAYS

• Scott Barry Kaufman – Scientific American
  The Psychology of Victimhood
• Psychology Today – Dr. Peg Streep
  Why Some People Stay Stuck in Victim Mode

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NEW THIS MONTH:
A weekly “office hours” session where parents at their wits’ end come find answers. 

As I’ve been writing this month’s reflection, I’ve been thinking a lot about the parents I’ve been working with lately.

Over the winter, I had the privilege of teaching an 8-week parenting course to a French-speaking group. What was meant to be a short program turned into 13 weeks, because the group asked to continue. Week after week, they kept coming back, not because everything had become easy, but because they were starting to see things differently, to understand what was happening in their families in a new way, and to feel a little less alone in it.

At the same time, in my individual coaching work, I’ve been meeting more and more parents who are dealing with situations that feel heavy, complex, and sometimes heartbreaking. Situations where it is not about a quick tip or a simple adjustment, but about finding a way to think, respond, and stay grounded in the middle of something that feels overwhelming.

Out of both of these experiences came a simple idea.

To create a space where parents can come as they are, with what they are dealing with right now, and not have to wait for things to get worse—or for the “right time” (or for a multi-week parenting class!)—to get support.

I am calling it:

The Parenting Hour (in English) 🇺🇸

La Permanence Parents (en français) 🇫🇷

These are weekly “office hours” for parents. A small group setting where you can drop in, bring whatever is on your plate that week, and we work through it together.

Sometimes you may be the only one there and have the full hour to yourself. Sometimes others will join, and what tends to happen is that one situation opens up insight for everyone. You get your own question worked on, and you also learn from what others bring.

These sessions are grounded in Adlerian parenting and Positive Discipline, so we are not just reacting to the situation of the moment, but trying to understand what sits underneath it—and how to respond in a way that actually holds over time.

I have offered this format many times in the past through the Parent Encouragement Program (PEP), and parents consistently tell me it is one of the most helpful ways to get support: focused, practical, and immediately applicable.

I have intentionally kept the cost low so that it can be accessible, and the format flexible so you can join when you need it.

• Weekly (lunchtime sessions)
• In English and in French (separate groups)
• $25 per session
• Limited to 6 parents per session, so everyone has space to bring what matters

It is first come, first served—and I do expect many of these sessions to fill.

If this is something that would support you, you can sign up here:

And if you have questions, feel free to reach out.

SPEAKING OF PARENTING:

Happy and proud to showcase my latest article on behalf of PEP in Washington Parent about

CELEBRATING DIFFERENCES: RAISING KIDS WHO RESPECT AND RELATE