Vulnerability is not victim mentality

There is a particular kind of conversation that makes something in me almost physically recoil, what some people would call the ick, and unfortunately I'm hearing it increasingly often. It isn't vulnerability, although it seems to be conflated with it regularly.

I can sit with vulnerability all day. Tell me you're hurt, tell me you're scared. Somebody broke your heart, your confidence has taken a beating, you're lost and you don't know what the fuck you're doing next. Tell me something happened and you're struggling to make sense of it. None of that bothers me.

What exhausts me is victim mentality, the point where everything that has happened becomes somebody else's responsibility, and every explanation for why you are stuck conveniently removes you from the question of what's next. Vulnerability says this hurt me... agency says what am I going to do now... victim mentality says this happened to me, therefore I'm stuck, and somebody else is the reason I cannot move forward.

People will tell you they're just being vulnerable, that they're just telling you what happened to them. Sometimes that's true, but telling somebody what happened is only half of vulnerability. If the telling never moves anywhere, if it becomes the whole point instead of the start of one, that isn't vulnerability. That's victim mentality.

The way I respond to people has changed over my life. When I was younger, I didn't have a word for it, I just felt uncomfortable whenever someone told me something was wrong because I saw it as my job to fix it. That's how I was raised. I had to be a problem solver to stay safe. I'm still a problem solver at work, and I'm a problem solver as a mother, but it isn't my job to solve my partner's issues for him.

As I grew older, I realised empathy was just sitting with someone as they process for themselves, sometimes asking questions to understand them better. Asking the questions I wished somebody had asked me, people usually found their own way forward. But what I've since found is that it isn't really about a type of person. Somebody can be a problem solver in one part of their life and stay completely stuck in another. They can run a business, raise a family, handle everything work throws at them, and still choose victimhood the moment it comes to a particular relationship, habit or grievance.

I've made the mistake of giving grace and opportunity again and again to people who chose to stay stuck, who kept making the same choices while knowing the outcome, because of their childhood, because of this that and the other. I don't make those excuses for myself, nor am I here to compare trauma. But because I don't make those excuses for myself, I don't need to sit there while somebody else makes them endlessly, refusing to acknowledge their own agency today. I haven't always made the right choices either, but regardless of the reasons behind them, I own those choices. I chose them. Nobody made me do it, and only I can choose something different. I can choose to learn from it, or I stay stuck.

I don't need to hold anyone to my standards. But once somebody chooses a path that denies themselves agency, and therefore denies growth, it becomes tedious and exhausting, because the same grievance comes back endlessly with no movement, no accountability and no willingness to look at what belongs to them. That is emotional labour, and nobody owes anyone else ongoing emotional labour when they refuse agency for themselves. At that point, I'm no longer witnessing somebody processing pain. I'm on a merry-go-round, going around in circles with them. At some point I have to get off, or I will stay stuck there too. So that is where I've learned to step back, to remove myself.

Not because I stopped having empathy. I have plenty of it. I can tell somebody that was really shit and I'm sorry it happened to them. I can listen. I can sit beside them for a while. I can encourage them to get help if they need it. What I cannot do is use my empathy to replace somebody else's agency. I cannot manufacture self respect for them or regulate their entire emotional life. There's also a particular trap in offering somebody suggestions, when the suggestion doesn't work, they're often quick to turn around and blame you for it not working, instead of taking any ownership of what they did with it. I cannot keep reassuring somebody that they are capable while they remain committed to explaining why everybody else is the reason they are not.

Mothering a partner

I think this is also part of what women mean when they say they don't want to mother a partner. Domestic labour can absolutely be part of that dynamic, but it isn't the whole thing. A man can cook, clean, do his own washing and keep an immaculate house while still expecting to be mothered emotionally. The deeper issue is whether another adult is expected to show up for him emotionally more than he is willing to show up for himself, to carry his inner life for him, regulate him, reassure him endlessly, tell him what to do, hold his confidence for him, explain his behaviour back to him, absorb every grievance and somehow keep him moving when he refuses to move himself.

A partner is different. A partner can be vulnerable. They can say they've had a shit day. They can cry, tell you they're frightened or confused or hurt or lost, lean on you. You can listen, encourage them, offer perspective if they want it. But underneath that is still the sense that their life belongs to them. Their hand is still on the steering wheel. Someone who wants a partner for the right reasons wants company along the way. Someone who wants to be mothered wants somebody else to do the walking for them.

I increasingly think agency is what makes real vulnerability possible. When somebody isn't permanently casting themselves as the victim of everybody around them, they can actually be emotionally available. They can say this hurt me without requiring somebody else to repair their entire sense of self. They can be honest about pain while still believing, somewhere underneath it, that they will get through this. That is incredibly different from learned helplessness.

That feeds into a constant need for validation. Somebody who needs that kind of validation constantly can't take criticism, even when it's constructive, even when it's offered to help them. It becomes impossible to actually help them process what they're feeling, because processing isn't what they want. Being told they're right is.

The really difficult part in all of this is that they want to outsource the emotional labour, but the moment it no longer suits them, they'll turn around and say, 'You're not my mother.' No. I'm not. Grow up.

The same dynamic shows up in something else, the tiptoeing. It isn't about being rude. Sometimes I know how something would land, especially with voice to text, I'll read something back later and think, oh shit, that just said thanks a lot, that could be read so many different ways, so I'll clarify. One time, the response was, I didn't take it as rude, I know you're not rude. It isn't necessarily my oldest or newest friends who'd say that. It's generally people who are emotionally mature, who don't need to make somebody else the villain so they can remain the victim. But there are other people who do exactly that. They don't think twice about how they speak to me, and I'm the one tiptoeing around their feelings. That isn't maturity. It's still emotional labour, just repackaged, it's still expecting somebody else to coddle you. Being direct is not being aggressive, and if you can never take criticism, if your need for validation means you can never be wrong, you'll stay right there.

That's part of why I've learned to listen and ask questions instead of telling somebody outright, partly because I can't be certain my experience is the same as theirs, or that I'm even reading what they're saying correctly. I'm not trying to steer it anywhere. But somehow the questions always lead back to agency anyway. I never really have to spell that out for somebody, because it's the framework I already use on myself, to work through my own stuff.

Where learned helplessness starts

Learned helplessness is something I think we need to talk about more, because sometimes we teach it without meaning to. I notice it in parenting. There is obviously an age where children need us to regulate them, remind them, help them, carry more responsibility and teach them how the world works. That is parenting. But there is a point where grace can quietly turn into exemption.

He forgot... he doesn't notice those things... he's not as mature... he just doesn't think about cleaning up... he'll get there eventually. Meanwhile, another child beside him may already be expected to remember, notice, regulate themself, do the task, accept the consequence and think about how their behaviour affects everybody else. Children notice those differences.

Teaching agency is also teaching boundaries, and it doesn't have to be cruel. It can be as simple as telling a child that's fine, you don't want to do it right now, your sibling has finished what they needed to do so they can have the promised iPad time, and you can have yours when you've finished too. They can be disappointed. They can tantrum or protest, and I can hold space for them in that. I can see that you're angry, but I'm not going to move that boundary. I'm here for you, but I'm not going to do this for you. Sometimes while they're learning I might do it with them a few times, or help them get started, if task initiation is the problem. I've found sometimes I don't even need to help, I can just sit with them while they do it.

But at some point, we must respect their agency so that they can grow up to respect their own. That doesn't mean ignoring capacity. Expecting wonders from a child right before bedtime, or when they're already exhausted, isn't reasonable either. Respecting agency means working within what somebody is actually capable of in that moment, not pretending capacity doesn't exist.

If the boundary disappears every time the reaction gets big enough, we are teaching something completely different. Instead of passing on the learning that they can do something difficult and move through the discomfort, they learn that if they resist long enough, somebody else will eventually remove the requirement. That isn't kindness, it can become learned helplessness, and it can exist alongside entitlement in an incredibly destructive way, I can't do anything about this, and somebody else should. I've noticed it's more often a pattern with boys, though not always, it could be a boy or a girl on either side of it. We sometimes call it giving grace when what we may actually be teaching is that if a child doesn't notice, act, regulate or take responsibility, somebody else eventually will.

When my daughter is being rude or disrespectful, not regulating, and I've ruled out the immediate reasons why, is something on her mind, is she hungry, does she want a shower, does she need water, should we go for a walk, and she's still being rude, I say to her, buddy, in the common areas of the house we treat each other with respect. If you're not able to do that, you're going to need to go to your room to regulate. If you need me with you, I'm happy to be there to help. You can leave the door open, you can have your iPad, you can do whatever it is you want to do. But when we're in the common areas of the house, the rules exist for reasons beyond just you, you're part of a household, not the centre of it, and you have to treat people with decency and respect. If you can't do that, it's best you're on your own for a little while, not as a punishment, just to take some time until you're better able to engage. You choose when that is. She knows I'm not sending her there as a punishment, rather it's a regulation tool.

There have been times I've been the one spiralling, and she's the one who's said, mum, I think we both need some time in our room. I used to feel a wall build up inside me when she said that. Now, hearing her say it breaks that wall down instead and I quietly chuckle. I'm grateful she's picked it up as a regulation tool, not a punishment.

What you do with the blueprint

When adulthood arrives, the person who learned that helplessness has to decide what they're going to do with it. This is where I become impatient with another version of the same argument, well, my mother did this, my mother overprotected me, my mother didn't teach me, my mother coddled me. OK - maybe she did. Understanding where a pattern came from is useful; but blaming the person who helped create it doesn't change it. At some point, my mother taught me this has to become now I know I have this habit or tendency, so what am I going to do differently. Otherwise knowing where it came from is just another way of standing still.

This particular version of the argument shows up constantly, and it usually lands on a specific target, single mothers, as if the whole thing comes down to who was actually at home raising the kids. Most single mothers are doing everything they can to raise their children, often completely on their own. If anyone in that story deserves scrutiny, it's the men who walked out the door and never looked back, not the women who stayed and carried it. I'm not saying every man who makes that argument had an absent father, or that every absent father raised a son who ended up here. I'm saying that it's just another way of dodging accountability.

And fathers exist too. Men are also responsible for raising their children, also contribute to the household, also shape the emotional climate their children grow up in. Yet so many things still get framed through female responsibility. The house is untidy, she is lazy. The child is struggling, what did the mother do. The adult man lacks certain emotional skills, and somehow we're right back at what his mother failed to teach him.

At some point you have to stop moving through the world as though you are helpless. You have agency. Independence isn't just earning your own money, doing your own washing, keeping your house clean and holding down a job. It's emotional too... it's becoming emotionally independent enough to be your own compass.

Maybe you were handed a terrible blueprint. I certainly was. That doesn't mean the blueprint becomes an inevitable destiny. Being an adult means being able to look at what you were handed and say this is where I came from, this is where I want to be, and this is the gap between them. What am I going to do about it? That is what conscious choice actually means.

Looking at the wound without living there

Trauma is real. It isn't an obstacle you can simply think positively around. Sometimes trauma changes you profoundly. Sometimes you don't even get the luxury of processing it when it happens because you still have to survive. You bury some of it because you need to work, you need to live, you need to feed yourself, you need to raise your kids, you need to get up the next day and keep moving. That is survival.

Later, when you finally have some space, you can look back; you can understand where you came from, why you reacted the way you did, why you stayed, what you learned, what you missed, what you normalised because it was all you knew. But looking back to understand it is not the same as choosing to stay there. The point of looking at the wound is not to deny it, it's to understand what belongs to you now. What happened to you matters, the impact matters... AND as an adult, agency matters more now. All of those things can be true at the same time. Vulnerability and agency can coexist, neither cancels the other out.

I grew up with an extremely abusive blueprint. I know deprivation, I know what it is to have things happen that for some people are utterly life altering. That doesn't mean I never get stuck, I do. Something happens at work, in a relationship, in life, and sometimes my first response is still that I cannot believe this happened to me or that someone else did this. Sometimes I have also made choices that I regret.

Agency is not never being wounded, it's not never falling apart. It's also not toxic positivity, it's not pretending everything that happened was wonderful or somehow meant to make you stronger. It is recognising the facts and eventually asking what is mine, what is theirs, and what am I going to do now.

I have had to pivot more times than I could count, and my ability to pivot is probably one of the biggest reasons I am still moving. My car broke down... OK, what am I going to do next? Somebody hurt me... OK, what am I going to do next? I had to leave that toxic workplace... OK, what am I going to do next? My childhood taught me terrible patterns.... OK, what am I going to do next? That question doesn't minimise the problem, it's about not letting one thing derail you completely.

Self reflection versus self referencing

This is where I think people sometimes confuse self reflection with self referencing. Talking endlessly about what happened to you is not necessarily self reflection. You can know every therapy word in existence and still never truthfully turn the lens inward. Self reflection isn't just cataloguing in exquisite detail everything somebody else did to you. Sometimes it's asking what you ignored, what pattern you were repeating, what you learned, what belongs to you, what you can recognise earlier next time, what you're going to do differently. That isn't self blame. You can be entirely innocent of somebody else's behaviour and still have something to learn from your own experience. If every reflection ends with somebody else remaining the reason you cannot change, you haven't actuallly moved your lens inward. You've just found a more sophisticated language for staying exactly where you were.

The manosphere's trade

I should say where I'm looking at this from. I'm consciously not dating presently, but my engagement in dating is with men, I'm heterosexual - that's not intended as judgement, it's simply my framework. I've seen this same pattern in women too, and I suspect it exists on the other side as well, but my algorithm has clearly picked up on an interest in personal accountability, so that's generally the framing I get served. It isn't categorically unique to one gender. But it's an especially common pattern in online spaces, and whenever I come across manosphere content, this is what it always boils down to for me - a lack of agency, a refusal to actually take control of your own life. There always seems to be somebody else to blame. That is not a framework for growth.

Maybe this is why I react so strongly now to the endless rhetoric that men are not allowed to be vulnerable. I completely accept that many men were taught that emotion was weakness, but vulnerability and victim mentality are different. Being lonely and uncertain of how to build meaningful connection is vulnerability. Being rejected and feeling like your confidence has taken a battering is vulnerability. Feeling lost and unsure what your place is anymore is vulnerability. All of those things can create connection. But if every one of those admissions becomes followed by because women, because feminism, because dating apps, because society, because my ex, because my mother, then the conversation has changed.

The manosphere talks incessantly about male power while often giving men an increasingly elaborate explanation for why they have none. It takes legitimate male pain and converts it into grievance. It takes loneliness and hands men a villain. It takes rejection and turns it into ideology. It takes vulnerability and strips the accountability out of it. Men have it hard quietly becomes women have it easy. But that doesn't follow at all.

One of the clearest places I see that grievance is around women's independence. Men were told for generations that part of their role was to protect women. But women also learned, often brutally, that men were sometimes the people they most needed protecting from. So women adapted - they learned to earn their own money, make their own decisions, protect themselves, watch their surroundings, leave, rebuild and keep going. That isn't some glamorous feminist fantasy, it's usually the result of understanding that our safety cannot be outsourced. The research is clear that we're most at risk from men we know, not strangers.

And then some men look at that and say women don't need them anymore, so what are they for. Fair question. So become someone worth trusting. If protection mattered so much to your sense of purpose, make yourself safe. Be the person whose presence lowers somebody's vigilance rather than increasing it. Be consistent. Respect no. Don't control somebody and call it protection. Don't make another person responsible for managing your emotions. Don't expect trust before you've built it. You still have agency there too.

The same is true in dating. There is endless discussion about women supposedly wanting some collection of sixes, six feet tall, six figures, six pack, whatever the latest version is. Maybe some women do. People date for all sorts of reasons. But reducing every rejection to that is another very inonvenient way to avoid asking whether something in the interaction itself made the other person decide not to continue. Sometimes it has less to do with sixes and more to do with one, one date, one conversation, being enough to hear it all.

Attraction is real too, somebody can simply decide they aren't attracted to you, and that isn't a grievance, it's a preference. But when somebody is dating from a place of emotional maturity, rejection generally has far more to do with who you are as a person than whether you hit four, five or six of anything. And if you show up unkempt or behave badly, that isn't the sixes talking either. Growth looks like asking why, the same way you might ask for feedback after a job interview, telling somebody you'd genuinely like to learn from it. Something like, 'I completely understand if this just comes down to attraction, but if you're comfortable sharing, was there anything about how I presented myself that I could learn from.' It also means being honest that you genuinely want to learn, and being prepared to hear something you might not want to hear without losing your cool. You can end that conversation at any point, you have that agency. And you don't have to accept what somebody says about you if, after honestly sitting with it, you don't believe it's true. That's agency too.

Every ex was crazy, every woman used me, women only want money, nobody appreciates good men, everybody has treated me badly. That isn't the same as speaking about what you learned from a relationship, or understanding the red flags you ignored, or explaining the ways you weren't compatible with an ex. Those are actual reflection. Blaming somone else on repeat isn't.

A lot of people will simply think, I'm not doing another one of these. They won't argue with you or try to rehabilitate you. They won't explain your worldview back to you, and they certainly won't come back for seconds. And when silence gets read as more proof that women are the problem - that's is just how the cycle repeats.

What matters more than what happened

I don't consider somebody's trauma a reason not to engage with them - I have trauma too. Trauma itself is not what makes somebody impossible to be with. What matters far more to me is what they are doing with their present. I don't care that you have wounds, I care whether you've built your entire identity around them. Getting stuck happens to everybody, that's not the issue, what actually matters is whether you're willing to move again. And if somebody hurt you, that matters less to me than whether what they did has become your permanent explanation for why you refuse responsibility for everything that happens next.

I have made bad choices in my own life. One of the biggest things I've had to learn is how many of those choices involved offering endless empathy and grace to people who kept making destructive choices themselves. And yet, I chose to stay. I made compromises to stay, compromises that could have ended worse if I'd let them. I kept thinking that understanding somebody meant I should give them more room, that compassion meant patience without limits, that if I could understand why they behaved the way they did, I should continue making allowances for it. That's my lesson, and I've learned it. I won't do that anymore, because endless empathy for somebody who refuses to take agency doesn't move them forward, it just keeps you stuck beside them.

I can care about what happened to somebody without making their refusal to move forward part of my life. I can understand their past and still judge their present by what they choose to do with it. I can say that's really shit, I'm sorry, I'm here if you need to talk for a while. But I am not here to play handball with the same grievance, tossed back to me over and over again with no accountability ever being taken and therefore nothing ever changing. That's their game, not mine. If somebody chooses to stay stuck, I am not staying there with them. Partner, friend, family, whoever. I have a life to live, and a child to raise. I have shit to do. That isn't a lack of empathy. It is recognising where my responsibility ends.

I think the distinction I have finally learned is this. Telling somebody what happened to you isn't automatically vulnerability. Sometimes that isn't vulnerability, it's victim mentality. Vulnerability tells the truth about what happened. Self reflection asks what it means. Agency asks what now. None of those require pretending the past was okay. They simply refuse to let the past have the final word.