VICTIMHOOD
Rethinking Victimhood and Where Responsibility Belongs
For much of my life, I rejected the word victim.
Not because harm did not occur. It did. I experienced abuse from both of my parents in different ways. What I did not understand until much later was that the resistance came from what the word implied to me.
Victim felt like complicity.
Like weakness.
Like I should have been smarter, stronger, or more capable of stopping what happened.
In my mid forties, someone asked how it felt to understand that I was a victim. My immediate response was no. Not because it was untrue, but because the language placed weight on me that never belonged there.
I offered a different framing.
Instead of defining myself as a victim, I named the behavior as inappropriate.
That distinction changed everything.
Saying the behavior was inappropriate separates the person who was harmed from the actions that caused harm. It makes it clear that responsibility does not sit with the child, the partner, or the employee who experienced the behavior. It sits with the person who acted inappropriately.
This reframing does not deny the past. It does not minimize pain. It simply relocates responsibility to where it belongs.
Healing often begins when we stop carrying weight that was never ours to hold.
We cannot always control what happens to us. But we can choose the language that defines how we carry it forward.
Watch the video to explore this shift more deeply.
If you are building spaces for leaders, teams, or communities that value emotional intelligence and psychological safety, I would love to continue the conversation.