On the vulnerability mask, the amends gap, and what happens when recovery language becomes a shield against accountability
My ex-partner told me recently that he was sleeping well these days. Said it casually. Almost proudly. Like a man who’d finally found peace.
This is a man who never made an amends for his betrayal. Never owned his anger. Never took responsibility for the control, the lies, the women, the wreckage he left in every direction. Not once. Not to me. Not to anyone.
So I asked him. “You’re saying you’re having no trouble sleeping these days?”
And he said, “The result of a really good therapist.”
I texted him two words: Excavation addiction.
Understanding why you hurt someone isn’t the same as telling them you’re sorry. Naming your attachment style isn’t an amends. Crying in a therapist’s office about your mother doesn’t undo what you did to a woman who loved you. But that’s the beautiful lie of excavation addiction: you get to feel healed without ever doing the one thing that actual healing requires.
Accountability. Repair. Action.
He’ll sleep fine tonight. And tomorrow. And next year. Because he’s built a fortress out of insight and therapy-speak that protects him from ever having to face what he’s done. The excavation itself became the absolution. The digging is the penance. And as long as he keeps digging, blaming others, lying to himself and others, he never has to build, never has to apologize, never has to change.
Frequent liar miles. Redeemed for a good night’s sleep.
Mark Manson talks about the Buddha’s parable of the two arrows. The first arrow is the actual pain, the thing that happened. The second arrow is the narrative we create around it, the meaning, the story, the identity we build from the wound. And the second arrow, Manson points out, is the one that stays with us for decades. The actual pain heals. The story we tell about the pain can run our lives forever.
What I watched in recovery spaces, and what I lived through with my ex, was something the Buddha didn’t account for: people who’d turned the second arrow into a permanent residence. Not just carrying the narrative, but living inside it. Using it as an address. Decorating it. Inviting people over. And most importantly, using it as a reason to never, ever make the repairs that actual recovery demands.
The vulnerability performance becomes a permanent deferral of accountability. “I know, but I’m working on it.” Year after year. Same tears. Same circle. Zero change.
Recovery rooms are full of genuine pain, and I want to honor that before I say what I need to say next. There are good people in those rooms, some of them are the only people I really trust in this life. People who were hurting, genuinely trying, genuinely using the tools the way they were meant to be used, and building something real on the other side.
But some of those rooms are also hunting grounds. And nobody likes to talk about that.
They’re rooms full of vulnerable, open-hearted people who are actively practicing trust for the first time, and some of the people sitting in that circle aren’t there to heal.
They’re there to feed.
My ex-partner had five love-interests in as many years. All from the program. Every single one. He’d sit in that circle week after week, telling the same stories: the childhood wounds, the attachment patterns, the deep, rehearsed vulnerability that made every woman in the room – including me – think wow he’s doing the work. He’s different. He’s vulnerable. He gets it. And the whole time he was cheating, enmeshed with his ex, lying to the group, to his therapist, to every woman who believed the performance. He wasn’t sober by any definition of the word that actually matters. The codependent equivalent of an alcoholic showing up drunk at an AA meeting and pouring everyone a glass too.
And here’s the thread that runs through the entire culture that nobody is pulling on: wearing the vulnerability mask is a way of avoiding accountability for real harm.
When he sat in that circle and cried about his childhood, when he used the language of recovery and spoke about his patterns with that practiced softness, he wasn’t healing. He was building a shield. Because as long as he was “the wounded man doing his work,” nobody held him accountable for the fact that he was actively 13th stepping real people in real time. The wound story became a get-out-of-jail-free card. And the room kept accepting it because the room was designed to validate pain, not to question whether the pain was being used as a weapon.
Manson makes a point that I think about constantly. He says that the narratives we create as children to cope with pain are often the very things that hold us back as adults. The story that saved you at seven is the story that’s destroying your relationships at thirty-five. And the project of real recovery isn’t just discovering those narratives. It’s learning to rewrite them. Not perform them. Not recite them like liturgy in a church basement every Tuesday. Rewrite them. Through action. Through changed behaviour. Through the unglamorous, unwitnessed, unapplauded work of showing up differently in your actual life.
The entire architecture of most recovery programs is built on the concept of making amends. Steps 8 and 9. Make a list, make it right. It’s literally the structural center of the thing. And yet the culture that grows up around these rooms creates a loophole wide enough to drive a truck through: if you’re still “in your process,” if you’re still “working on it,” if you’re still performing the wound with enough eloquence, you never actually have to face the people you’ve hurt and change your behaviour.
Playing the victim means you never have to make a real amends.
And his therapist? The one who helped him sleep so well? She was part of the architecture. Weekly sessions, indefinite timelines, no growth criteria. As long as he kept showing up to the chair and mining the childhood wounds, he could walk out feeling like he’d done something. Meanwhile, the people he’d destroyed were still standing in the rubble his infidelity left behind.
His therapist didn’t help him heal. She helped him narrate. And the narration became the most comfortable place he’d ever lived. More comfortable than any relationship. More comfortable than any truth.
The woman he was involved with during our relationship had been in the program for ten years. A decade of meetings, a decade of “recovery,” and she was engaging in behavior that would make your jaw hit the floor. Emotional manipulation, guilt-tripping, punishing, trapping him in cars screaming, writing letters demanding attention. Every pattern you can imagine, fuelled by a bottomless pit of unresolved pain that ten years of meetings, rehab, and recovery hadn’t even touched. But she could still sit in that circle and share about her wounds. Still get the nods. Still perform the role.
Because the room is perfect for performance, not transformation.
Were they both responsible? Absolutely. Two people performing recovery while actively destroying everyone around them. Using the language of healing as a smokescreen for behavior that belonged nowhere near a recovery space. Both hiding behind their wound stories to avoid ever having to actually work on their obvious enmeshment.
And that’s the vulnerability mask doing exactly what it’s designed to do. Not healing. Not growing. Not making amends. Avoiding accountability by performing the wound instead of repairing the damage.
He once said to me, “I think I was codependent in my mother’s womb.”
And that’s when I knew. That one sentence is the entire disease in one breath. When the goal posts of the origin story keep moving until it doesn’t even make sense anymore…they have long become the permanent address.
When the reason why becomes more important than the what now. When the wound becomes your identity so completely that you can’t tell where the pain ends and the person begins. First it was the ex-wife, then the young adulthood, then the teenage years, then the childhood, the grandfather, the aunt, the church, the neighbours, the son, the borther. And finally, the womb. Always one more layer. Always one more reason. Rarely a single changed behaviour.
That’s excavation addiction. Not excavation. Excavation addiction. The compulsive return to the dig site, the belief that if you just go one layer deeper, you’ll be free. But the digging never ends because the digging itself has become the reward. The tears, the nodding, the circle telling you how brave you are for sharing. And then you go home and do nothing different. Show up next week. Repeat.
Manson said something else that I haven’t been able to shake. He said we’re not wired for truth. We’re wired for self-preservation. And the most dangerous form of self-preservation I’ve ever witnessed isn’t denial. It’s insight without action. It’s the man who can describe his wound with devastating precision and use that precision as proof that he’s doing the work, while every person in his life is bleeding from the work he isn’t doing.
The saddest part is, everyone ends up hurt in the end, especially him.
The old model says: “I act this way because XYZ happened to me.” The because is the chain. It ties every harmful behaviour to a childhood wound, which means nothing can change until the wound is fully resolved. And wounds like these never fully resolve. So you’re trapped. Permanently excavating. Permanently explaining. Permanently a product of what happened to you. And permanently sleeping well at night because your really good therapist told you that understanding is enough.
It’s not.
Understanding why you hurt someone is step one. Making a real amends is step two. Actualy changing your behaviour is step three. And the vast majority of people performing recovery never make it past step one because the culture rewards the performance and nobody checks whether the performance matches the life.
If I ever return to a recovery space, I’ll carry both a sword and a trowel. The sword to protect myself from people who use vulnerability as a weapon. The trowel to build something real with every truth I uncover. And I’ll be very careful, very deliberate about who I let cross my threshold and how long I stay. Because the average of the five people you spend the most time with isn’t just a great quote that I love. It’s a law of nature.
And I refuse to let my five be people who’ve chosen their wound over their life, their performance over their amends, and their victim story over the truth – and I refuse to let that be me too.
Those who build, heal. Those who perform, stay sick. Those who use the wound as a mask for harm were never in recovery to begin with.
We’re not what happened to us. We’re the authors of what comes next. Whatever chapters were given to us, whatever scripts we were told were ours to speak, we have the choice to pick up the pen and write a new ending.
And we owe it to the people we’ve hurt to make sure the new ending includes a real amends. Not a performance. Not a share. Not a beautifully articulated journal entry about growth.
A changed life. In real time. Where it counts. That’s what I want for myself, and everyone I love.
Choose all,
xoxo Viktoria
P.S. If someone in your life can describe their patterns with the fluency of a psychologist and hasn’t changed a single behaviour in the years you’ve known them, that’s not recovery. That’s playing house in Neverland. And the cover charge is your sanity.
Trust what they do. Not what they share.
