On Victimhood and Responsibility

Capacity, Power, and the Erasure of Context

A response to the way the language of responsibility is used to silence rather than clarify.

Twenty years ago, at a time when I was barely holding myself together, the person I trusted most told me to stop acting like a victim.

His words sank in like a cold blade, silenced any instinctive defiance I may have had, and shame set in in its place. My lived experience was marked as a flaw of character, my pain reframed as my own error.

I spent years struggling with the embodied residue of that shame.

The idea that we are responsible for what happens to us is often presented, in popular moral discourse, as a form of empowerment, a sign of maturity or strength. But this framing relies on the false assumption that people always have meaningful access to choice.

They don’t.

Choice is shaped by conditions. When the system you are inside, the relationship you are embedded in, or the nervous system you are inhabiting constrains what is possible, responsibility cannot be neutral.

To proclaim otherwise is to confuse a moral preference with a contextual reality.

Treating harm as a failure of personal responsibility misunderstands how survival and coercion actually work.

Victimhood is not an identity.

It is a position.

By victimhood, I mean being located, sometimes briefly, sometimes repeatedly, in conditions where power, safety, or agency are limited.

Oppression operates through social realities that determine whose suffering is legible and whose is dismissed. These realities are not equal, and they are not imagined. In some worlds, harm is named. In others, it is minimized, normalized, or reframed as personal failure.

Victimhood, in this sense, is not weakness. It is context.

Context matters.

I had no awareness of my neurodivergence until just a few years ago. I did not understand that much of my lived experience was shaped by AuDHD and CPTSD. I had no framework—internal or social—for what was happening in my nervous system. My lack of language or understanding for this at the time did not reduce the reality of what I was going through.

​​This dynamic is not unique to neurodivergence. It appears where fear, dependency, coercion, or asymmetry negate agency and limit choice.

Clarifying capacity does not erase responsibility where it exists; it prevents responsibility from being falsely assigned.

In my context, I was not choosing poorly. I was in blind survival mode, and survival is not a choice; it is a constraint.

My perception was saturated. Emotional and sensory input entered without a filter. My body understood endurance, not rest or reflection. Meaning was fractured because capacity was overwhelmed. I had been pushed, for as long as I knew, to survive in an environment that shames limitation according to dominant social standards. I was isolated in a dense fog of confusion, self-blame, and fear—with the resulting distress treated as a failure of character rather than genuine lived experience.

Misinterpretation can be dangerous.

I recall connecting deeply to a poem years later by Alejandra Pizarnik. Words from a place I knew. A place once shamed for existing.

Being told to “stop acting like a victim” can utterly negate the urgency of a system under strain stating its limits. It can be the body signaling that it is at the edge of its capacity. Feeling like you are standing on the edge of a cliff with the abyss on one side and life on the other is generally terrifying for a reason. Dismissal does not produce resilience; it accelerates collapse. Compassionate attention opens possibility. The opposite of shutting down.

Naming this does not deny agency; rather, it locates where and when agency is actually available.

Harm is frequently a function of power. Reducing harm to individual failure conveniently obscures these dynamics. Power is relational, situational, and unevenly distributed across a spectrum of realities.

Responsibility for harm lies with the person or the system that caused it.

Responsibility after harm is different. It isn’t about rewriting the past to make suffering appear avoidable, nor about absolving oneself or others. Nor is it about assigning endless blame. It is about responding to consequences that were not chosen, once safety and capacity begin to return.

Accountability, in this sense, means:

• telling the truth about what happened
• allowing the impact to be real
• refusing to internalize another’s actions
• reclaiming agency as it becomes available

The safety for reclaiming agency requires honesty—about power, about harm, and about cost. Without honesty, “responsibility” becomes performance and the strain of self-negation continues.

In other words, when people are told to take responsibility too early, what is often demanded is not growth but containment—containment in the service of the convenience and comfort of others.

This is compliance, not accountability. Western culture praises resilience, but often only when it is quiet, efficient, and non-disruptive. For a long time the resilience word itself gave rise to anger in my bones. I’ve since adopted a more organic contextually-rooted understanding of the word so I can work with it again.

Responsibility cannot begin where experience is denied. It cannot grow in a body still bracing for threat. And it cannot emerge from shame. Shame only narrows capacity.

There are victims. This is a fact of unequal power, constrained choice, and lived bodies. Denying this does not restore agency; it relocates blame. Acknowledging this does not negate agency; it anchors agency in reality. It is a precondition for responsibility.

Anything else is not empowerment. It is erasure—of context, of harm, and of the conditions under which agency can return.