I notice this in myself more than I’d like to admit. The thing happened to me, so apparently I get to behave however that thing left me behaving. Forever, until further notice.
Except understanding why I react the way I do was never actually supposed to be the finish line. Somewhere along the way I think a lot of us, myself included, started treating it like one. Once you can name the wound, there’s a strange relief in it, like the explaining itself is the work. It isn’t. It’s the doorway into the work, which is a very different thing from the work.
What gets confusing is that explanation and excuse use almost identical language. “This happened to me” can be the start of an honest account of why I am the way I am, or it can be the end of any expectation that I’ll be different. Same six words, two completely different functions, and most of the time I can’t tell which one I’m doing until I notice whether anything has actually changed because of it.
There’s a kind of culture now, and I don’t think it’s all bad, around naming what happened to us. Attachment styles, trauma responses, nervous systems, all of it useful, all of it true as far as it goes. But I’ve started noticing how easily that vocabulary becomes a permanent residence instead of a temporary shelter. Once I can say “that’s my trauma talking,” there’s nothing left to argue with. It closes the conversation instead of opening it. Nobody can push back on a diagnosis the way they can push back on a choice.
I think part of what makes this so sticky is that staying in the explanation is genuinely safer than moving past it. If I’m still the person who was hurt, nobody can expect anything more from me yet. The moment I admit I’ve understood enough to do something differently, I become responsible for doing it differently, and that’s a much heavier thing to carry than simply being someone something happened to.
There’s also a kind of reward built into staying there that I don’t think gets talked about enough. The wound gets you sympathy. The explanation gets you understanding, sometimes admiration for how self-aware you’ve become. Actually changing the behavior gets you almost nothing, no audience, no validation, just a quieter version of yourself that nobody is applauding. It’s not hard to see why the explanation is the part that gets repeated and the change is the part that quietly never arrives.
I keep coming back to the idea that maturity isn’t a status you reach once you’ve sufficiently understood your trauma. It’s closer to a motion you keep making, again and again, the same motion of taking the explanation and asking what it actually costs me to keep using it as a stopping point instead of a starting one. Some days I make that motion. Most days, if I’m honest, I notice I haven’t, usually right after I’ve already used the explanation to get out of something.
I don’t think there’s a clean line between explaining myself and excusing myself, the kind you could draw once and never have to find again. I think it’s a line you have to keep re-finding, probably for as long as you’re alive, and I’m not sure that’s a failure of the idea so much as the actual shape of it.