A therapist once said something that lodged itself in my chest and refused to leave:
“The people who really need therapy often don’t go to therapists; their victims do.”
It wasn’t said with cruelty. It wasn’t said to shame anyone. It was said as an observation. A pattern. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The people who cause the most harm rarely sit awake at night wondering if they’re the problem. They don’t replay conversations, question their tone, or analyze whether they crossed a line. They don’t feel the slow, grinding erosion of self-trust that comes from being dismissed, blamed, or subtly controlled.
Their victims do.
Victims feel the need for therapy because something inside them knows that what they’re carrying doesn’t belong solely to them. The anxiety, the hypervigilance, the second-guessing, the physical tension that never quite releases — these aren’t personality flaws. They’re responses.
Therapy, for victims, often begins with a question that sounds deceptively simple:
“Am I imagining this?”
People who wield power irresponsibly rarely ask that question. They don’t need to. Systems are often built to confirm their version of reality. Their behavior is normalized, excused, or buried under policy language and procedure. When harm occurs, it’s reframed as a misunderstanding, a conflict, a perception issue.
The emotional labor of reconciling that distortion falls to the person who was harmed.
So they go to therapy.
They go because their nervous system is on fire.
They go because they can’t sleep.
They go because they’re replaying interactions that won’t resolve.
They go because something feels wrong and they’re trying to make sense of it without losing themselves.
Therapy becomes a place to process what the system refused to hold.
And that’s where the imbalance becomes painfully clear.
Therapy is not a consequence for causing harm. It’s a refuge for surviving it.
This doesn’t mean therapy isn’t valuable. It is. Deeply. It can be lifesaving. But it’s important to name what’s happening when therapy becomes the primary response to harm while the source of that harm remains untouched.
Healing becomes individualized. Responsibility does not.
Victims are asked to regulate themselves in environments that remain dysregulating. They’re encouraged to build resilience in systems that have no interest in becoming humane. They’re praised for insight, growth, and emotional intelligence while the behaviors that injured them continue uninterrupted.
The result is a quiet inversion of accountability.
The people who need therapy the most are often the least motivated to seek it, because therapy requires self-examination. It asks you to sit with discomfort. To tolerate not being the hero of your own story. To confront the impact of your actions, not just your intentions.
Power structures tend to reward the opposite.
So victims go instead. Not because they’re broken, but because they’re aware. Because they feel the weight of what happened. Because they’re trying to metabolize something that never should have been theirs to carry.
If this quote hit you hard, there’s a reason.
It doesn’t mean you’re weak.
It means you noticed.
And noticing is often the first step toward reclaiming yourself in a world that benefited from you not doing so.
If you’re reading this and wondering whether therapy is about fixing something inside you or surviving something outside you, that question matters.
I explore that tension more deeply in “Letting Go Without Therapy”, where we talk about what actually helps when distress is a rational response to an irrational environment.
