Layal #1: Always the Victim

A Therapy Story on Blame, Self-Discovery, and the Courage to be Accountable

DISCLAIMER: The account that follows is a fictionalised vignette, written to realistically illustrate therapeutic themes. Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental.

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Layal arrived at our first session in a storm cloud of grievance. She was forty-one, a mother of three, and her days brimmed with obligations. She woke before dawn to pack lunches, shepherd the children to school, and then drove a sixty-minute commute to her job. Work consumed her hours, and when she returned home, she would clock in for another shift: laundry, cooking, booking GP appointments, organising birthday parties, football practice, religious classes, filling out school forms, tidying up toys, shoes, and the endless trail of mess.

She was depleted, carrying more than one life could reasonably hold. And yet, despite the sheer weight she carried, she entered my office not with fatigue but with fury.

“My husband is useless,” she spat once. “He’s another child, not a partner. I ask him to help with the simplest things, and he botches it. I can’t rely on him. Better to just do it myself.”

What started as many unexpressed passing frustrations with her spouse had become calcified, layer by layer, into a bitter rage. Over time, resentment had taken the reins. Layal’s frustration found its voice in sharp outbursts: shouting across the kitchen, speaking critically, sometimes cruelly, and resorting to names and insults that left those around her recoiling.

This contempt did not stop with her husband. Her sister was “jealous and pathetic,” her boss “an incompetent buffoon,” her colleagues “lazy freeloaders.” Even her closest friends were branded “leeches who only call when they need something.” She rarely allowed silence; instead, she catalogued, with righteous energy, the failures of those around her and the thankless work of holding everything together herself. Each session began with an account of fresh betrayals, of others’ inadequacies.

And yet, for fleeting moments between the rants, her face would momentarily collapse into something else. Something unmistakably sad, solemn, lonely. Layal was perpetually isolating herself and then becoming outraged and devastated at finding herself isolated. She was wounding the very people she longed to feel close to and supported by. It became clear that a blueprint was at play here. A historically relevant narrative was replaying itself. This felt old.

In the early months, I listened with only the occasional challenge. On one occasion, after describing a particularly heated conflict that also ended in her husband “overdramatically“ withdrawing from her, leaving her feeling familiarly isolated and abandoned, I asked: “Layal, do you think there’s a way, however small or subtle, you might have contributed to that distance between you?”

She tightened. “Are you saying this is my fault?”, eyes narrowed, body leaning back as though to guard against assault. The air thickened with her indignation. Perhaps I had crossed the invisible line too soon, punctured her narrative before the ground beneath us was solid enough.

However, a pattern was undoubtedly emerging. One where she sets up the closest individuals in her life to fail her, to let her down. There is a temptation, with such clients, to rush toward confrontation, to point out the obvious common denominator in her endless litany of conflicts. But to do so prematurely risks confirming her suspicion that yet another person has failed to understand her.

Therapy is a delicate dance between the client’s intimate perception of reality and the therapist’s challenge to expand, question, or reframe it. There is always a moment when the therapist must choose between collusion and confrontation. Collusion, here, meant listening sympathetically, validating, and maybe even agreeing that the world had indeed dealt her an unfair hand. Confrontation risked rupturing the alliance, but without it, there would be no therapy, only ritual compliance.

So I retreated and waited, circling gently, until the moment felt right.

As always, another opportunity presented itself later on in our therapy, after a particularly heated monologue about her “pathetic“ husband. I slightly leaned in and said, “Layal, what would it be like to consider a new possibility? Perhaps one where you are not only the victim of others’ failures, but simultaneously an active participant in shaping these patterns?”

Her head snapped towards me. “What do you mean? That it’s my fault?” Her tone was edged with defiance. I did not rush to fill the silence. “I’m not speaking of fault, ‘fault’ is never helpful. I’m speaking of contribution, participation. Of what role you might be playing in these dramas that repeat themselves.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That sounds like something my husband would say when he wants to avoid blame.” I let the protest stand and waited.

After a short, rather awkward, silence, she remarkably recounted an argument with her eldest daughter, fifteen years old, from two weeks prior that she had failed to mention then.

“She shouted at me,” Layal said, her voice soft. “She said, ‘Mum, everything is always about you.’” She paused, as though stunned by her daughter’s words. I repeated softly: “Everything is always about you.” Then silence. Long enough that Layal’s eyes welled.

“It’s not true,” she whispered, but she did not seem to believe herself. The certainty had drained from her voice.

Over the next sessions, the edifice began to crumble. She began remembering small, incriminating moments: cutting off a friend mid-story to talk about herself; manically getting to her husband’s chores before he had the chance to hold it against him; mocking him for forgetting to pay a bill; fabricating memories to paint him in a particularly negative light to her parents.

“This is ugly,” she said once, staring at the carpet. “It’s manipulative. Maybe even selfish.”

“Ugly, maybe,” I replied. “But perhaps they serve a purpose, perhaps to protect”. “If you didn’t lash out, if you didn’t stand above them in judgment, what might you feel underneath?”

She looked at me for a long moment before whispering, “Alone. Invisible.”

“Perhaps this was a defence, a way of protecting yourself from that. Fair enough. But it has calcified. What protected you as a girl now isolates you as a woman.”

I could see the words land. For Layal, accountability had long equated to annihilation: to admit fault was to accept that she was unlovable. To admit that she, too, could wound others meant relinquishing the protective shield of victimhood. She had adored and idolised a mother who only rewarded performance and who pitted siblings against one another. The young Layal discovered that to avoid punishment, she had to appear blameless, the wronged party rather than the wrongdoer. She found safety in casting herself as the victim: if she was the injured one, then she could not be at fault, and if she was not at fault, she might still be worthy of her care.

The past was replaying itself. What felt like righteous fury at her husband or sister was, in fact, a shadow of an old script: the overburdened, unseen girl who held everything together, terrified to be left alone.

But in the crucible of therapy, she began experimenting with a different possibility: that accountability could be liberating, a way of stepping out of the exhausting performance of victimhood. Layal began to consider a new way of being.

At first, understandably, accountability felt like annihilation. “If I apologise to him and admit I’m selfish and sometimes cruel,” she said, “he might leave me. I’ll be hated.”

“Or,” I offered, “you might discover that people can still love you, even when you’re flawed. Perhaps especially then.”

This was her existential challenge: the confrontation with responsibility. To continue living as the misunderstood victim was to cling to the intoxicating clarity of blame.

Our work did, by no means, transform her overnight. Habits of a lifetime rarely yield so quickly. But a shift had occurred. She was aware. She no longer narrated her life as the tragic play of innocent Layal, beset by villains who ultimately abandoned her. She began, hesitantly, to say: “I did this. I pushed them away. I wanted control.”

It is a small miracle, that first moment when a client stops pointing outward and dares to turn inward. Layal’s journey was not to discover that others had wronged her; they had, often in fact, but to recognise her own participation. And with that recognition came something more precious than self-justification: the possibility of change.

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