For about two years, I had a story I told about my life.
It was a good one. Coherent, evidence-based, emotionally honest. It explained the opportunity that didn’t work out, the relationship that ended badly, the distance between where I’d imagined being at this point and where I actually was. I could tell it in ten minutes or in two hours. I got very good at it.
What I didn’t see—what took me a long time to see—was what the story was actually doing.
It wasn’t helping me understand my life. It was helping me stay still inside it.
Two Kinds of Stuck
In improv comedy, there’s a foundational rule: when your scene partner gives you something, you accept it. You say yes. Then you build on it. You say and. You never stop the scene by saying but. You take what you’re given, however inconvenient, however far from the script, and you continue.
Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman borrows this structure to describe what he calls an empowerment mindset—and its opposite. Because it turns out there are two very distinct ways to be stuck, and they look nothing like each other from the outside.
- The Over-Performer: The version everyone recognises—suppress, perform, push through. Call it strength. Never process anything. Keep moving because stopping feels dangerous.
- The Narrative Trap: This version is quieter and far more seductive. It’s where the thing that happened to you gradually becomes the organising principle of your entire identity. Where the past stops being context and becomes character. Where you stop being someone who went through something difficult and become someone to whom difficult things happen—and that’s the story, and the story is finished, and you are living inside it.
From the outside, this second track can look like self-awareness. From inside, it feels like clarity, because you’re not wrong about what happened. You’re just, very quietly, stopping the story at the place that keeps you most coherent. Most sympathetic. Least responsible for what comes next.
I know this because I did it for two years. And I was damn good at it.
What the Victim Mindset Actually Is — and Isn’t
Before going further: this concept gets weaponised, and that matters.
“Stop being a victim” has become a shortcut some people use to dismiss real pain, to avoid complexity, and to demand resilience from people who are still, legitimately, in the middle of something hard. That is not what I’m describing.
Kaufman is explicit: a victim mindset has nothing to do with whether terrible things happened to you. The suffering is real. The injustice may be real. The people who failed you probably did. That’s not in question.
What’s in question is what happens after. Whether the suffering becomes something you move through or something you live inside indefinitely. Whether your pain becomes the context for your life or the whole content of it.
The thing that makes this genuinely hard to see in yourself is that from inside, the victim mindset doesn’t feel like victimhood. It feels like accuracy. Every detail of your story is true. Every grievance is documented. The case is airtight.
The case is just—and this is the part that costs something to admit—also convenient. It explains the months you didn’t try hard. The relationships you underinvested in. The version of yourself you’ve been running at partial capacity, wrapped in the reasonable explanation that things have been difficult.
None of that is a lie. It’s just missing the and.
The Line That Rewired Something
Edith Eger is a psychologist who was taken to Auschwitz at sixteen. She lost her parents in the gas chambers. She survived conditions that most people reading this genuinely cannot comprehend, and spent decades afterwards as a therapist working with people trying to find their way through their own suffering.
She writes:
“No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us, but when we choose to hold onto our victimisation.”
I resisted that sentence the first time I read it. It felt like it was asking too much—to have suffered real things and also take responsibility for how you’re carrying them.
But I sat with it long enough to understand what she’s actually saying. She isn’t dismissing the pain. She’s pointing at a specific choice—the choice, made consciously or not, to remain inside the identity the pain created. And she’s saying that if it’s a choice, then it can be made differently.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist, puts the same insight in starker terms:
“Sometimes we’re responsible for things not because they’re our fault, but because we’re the only ones who can change them.”
That sentence changed how I saw my own story. Not because it let anyone off the hook, but because it made something visible I had been working hard not to see directly: waiting for vindication, for the right conditions, for someone else to close the loop—none of that was a strategy. It was a way of staying completely still while feeling like I was engaged.
What the “And” Requires
The and is not optimism. It’s not reframing. It’s not finding the lesson or the silver lining or being grateful for the growth opportunity. It’s a refusal—specific and quiet—to let the yes be the last word.
- Yes, I was failed by people who should have known better. And I am not waiting for them to fix it.
- Yes, this shaped me in ways I’m still working through. And it is not the whole story.
- Yes, some of this was genuinely unfair. And unfair is not the same as unchangeable.
The and doesn’t minimise the yes. It doesn’t ask for premature forgiveness or for you to pretend the hard thing didn’t happen. It asks one simple question: now that it has—what next?
That question, for a long time, felt threatening to me because answering it meant leaving the story. And the story, for all its weight, was familiar. It was contained. It was, in a strange way, safe.
What I’ve had to learn—and am still learning—is that the story was never the actual thing. The story was what I built while I was waiting to start.
The Shift That Isn’t Comfortable
Kaufman separates what he calls tough love from honest love. Tough love dismisses: stop complaining, toughen up, move on. It has no patience for the real complexity of how people get stuck, and it mostly makes things worse by adding shame to injury.
But coddling fails people, too—the version that validates staying stuck indefinitely, that treats ongoing victimhood as identity, that asks nothing and offers only sympathy. It sounds like compassion, but it keeps people in place.
Honest love is harder. It says: I see the real thing you went through, and I refuse to let it be the ceiling of your life. It holds both at once. Yes. And.
That’s what this framework, at its best, is asking of us. Not to minimise what happened, but to refuse to stop there.
What I’m Working On
The yes in my life is still there. [cite_start]I haven’t thrown the story away; some of it still needs to be understood more completely.
But I’m learning to notice when I reach for it as an explanation in moments when what I actually need is a decision. When describing why something is hard becomes a substitute for asking what to do about it. When the well-built case for my circumstances becomes a reason not to move through them.
I don’t always catch it in time. [cite_start]Sometimes I tell the story anyway. Sometimes it still feels better than the alternative. But I know the question now. And knowing the question is most of the work.
When did you last say “and”? Not the polite version, but the one that actually requires something of you.
Yes—all of that happened.
And.