When Confirmation Seeks the Counsellor's Chair

François Wessels PhD | ReSculpt

There is a particular quality to the silence that follows a practitioner's first gentle question to a client who has not come to change. The question lands — and nothing moves. Or worse: it provokes.

Some clients arrive in the consulting room not primarily in search of transformation, but in search of confirmation. They do not want a new story. They want the existing one validated, witnessed, and applauded. They are in pain — real, legitimate, hard-earned pain — but at this particular moment, beingrightis more important than beinghealed.

This article is about that client. About what she brings. About the ethical challenge she poses. And about an approach that honours her pain without becoming its hostage.

Meet Erin.

Erin's Story

Erin is twenty-six. She works in a corporate environment where an older male colleague called her 'baby', made hurtful remarks about her appearance and body weight, and used her professional vulnerabilities as material for public humiliation. She lodged a grievance. She was not vindicated. She was marginalised — quietly, persistently, without official acknowledgement. What followed was not justice, but a slow, relentless experience of institutional rejection: the kind of secondary wounding that is, in many ways, more damaging than the original event.

She arrives at the first session carrying two things: enormous pain, and the discourse of the Victim.

These are not the same thing. The pain is real and entirely warranted. The discourse of the Victim, however, is a set of narrative positionings that have recruited her pain into a particular story shape — one that offers her both coherence and a cost she has not yet consciously counted.

Trapped in the Triangle

In 1968, the psychiatrist Stephen Karpman described a destructive relational pattern he called the Drama Triangle. Three positions. Three roles. TheVictim("Poor me"). ThePersecutor("It is all your fault"). TheRescuer("Let me help you"). The roles are not fixed — participants shift between them as the drama unfolds. But the triangle itself remains intact, and agency, growth and transformation remain outside its frame.

What makes the Victim position so complex is that it is simultaneously a response to genuine harmanda relational strategy. The Victim keeps the drama alive by recruiting a Rescuer who — by offering comfort, agreement and validation without any challenge — unwittingly entrenches the Victim's helplessness and ensures nothing fundamentally changes. The Rescuer feels helpful. The Victim feels understood. But nothing moves.

From a broader perspective, the Victim position is also apower discourse. To occupy it is to gain a particular form of moral authority: the Victim is the one whose anger is justified, the one who cannot be questioned without the questioner being cast as the next Persecutor. This is not cynical manipulation. It is a coherent, if costly, exercise of the only form of power available to someone who has experienced genuine powerlessness.

Erin's discourse of the Victim is her protest against an organisational system that failed her. It is also, paradoxically, the discourse that may be keeping her anchored in the wound.

The Practitioner's Dilemma

Narrative therapy is committed to being a respectful, non-blaming approach that centres people as the experts in their own lives. The practitioner is decentred, non-directive, not the expert on the client's story. The person is not the problem. The problem is the problem.

This creates a genuine dilemma with Erin. The practitioner cannot ethically position herself as the corrector of Erin's narrative. But neither can she function as an applauding audience to a story pattern that is causing Erin harm. To validate the Victim position uncritically is not to respect Erin — it is to rescue her into further dependence, and to be recruited into the very triangle the practitioner set out to navigate.

Erin experiences externalisation — the narrative practice of separating the problem from the person — as the counsellortaking his side. In her binary frame, any movement toward complexity is a betrayal of loyalty. You are either with her or against her. There is no third position.

The practitioner's task is to find that third position — and hold it open.

"I cannot be your applauding audience. I can be your honest witness."

Safety Without Pacification

Erin resists safety practices. 'I don't like that!' When the practitioner invites grounding exercises or breathing practices, she experiences these as attempts to silence her, to take away her anger, to make her manageable.

She is not being irrational. She is being coherent.

Erin's nervous system has learned — correctly — that the environment is not safe. Her workplace punished her for speaking up. Her anger is not a symptom; it is the nervous system doing exactly what it has learned to do: maintaining vigilance, mobilising anger as a protective resource, treating any offer of comfort as a potential trap.

So conventional safety practices will not work here. What is needed instead is what might be calledadversarial safety— safety that protects her right to be angry, that arms her story rather than disarming her body.

"Safety is not about putting down your weapons. It is about giving your anger a protected place to stand."

In practical terms, this might sound like this:"I am not going to ask you to calm down. What I would like to offer you is a conversation in which your anger is treated as intelligent — as something that knows something. Would that be a different kind of conversation from the ones you have been having?"

This reframe does several things at once: it refuses the rescuing role, it honours the anger without collapsing into it, and it introduces the possibility that the anger has something to say beyond 'I am hurt.'

Externalising the Discourse, Not the Person

When the practitioner suggests externalising 'the bullying', Erin hears:And now you, too, are separating me from the harm that was done. You are protecting him.

The response is not to abandon externalisation — but to locate it more carefully. What if the first externalisation is not of the bully, and not of the bullying, but of thewider discoursesthat made both possible?

The discourse ofGendered Contempt. OfBody-Policing. OfPerformance-as-Worth. These are not Erin's inventions, and they are not uniquely the bully's inventions either. They are cultural and institutional inheritances that both parties were recruited into — and which injure many people beyond this immediate interaction.

"Your anger can be bigger than one man. It can protest on behalf of every woman who was silenced before you."

This reframe positions Erin not as the sole target of one man's cruelty, but as one of many people harmed by a wider toxic cultural practice. Her anger is given a larger home. She is no longer only the victim of one man — she is the woman who named what others have been silently enduring.

A three-layer conversation might explore:

• Layer One:What does this discourse of Gendered Contempt do to Erin — in her body, her confidence, her inner conversation?

• Layer Two:What did it do to the team — the silences, the side-taking, those who watched and said nothing?

• Layer Three:Where did this discourselearnto speak this way about women's bodies and women's right to name harm?

By the third layer, Erin's anger has moved outward from the wound. She is no longer only the wronged woman. She is also the analyst of a cultural practice that the practitioner has joined her in examining.

What the Anger Is Guarding

Behind every protest is a value. Behind every wound is a standard that was violated.

The narrative concept of the 'absent but implicit' invites us to ask: what is always present in the background of any expression of distress, but not yet named? When Erin expresses anger, something is absent but implicit in that expression — the care she has for herself, the standard of dignity she holds, the vision of how she deserved to be treated.

"What is your anger standing guard over? That is what matters most."

This question does not ask Erin to move away from her anger. It asks her to hear what it is saying. And that is a step — however small — toward a slightly less fused relationship with the wound.

In the first session, it becomes clear that validation from others is extremely important to Erin. She has close relationships with Perfectionism and Performance. The curious practitioner might gently ask:If validation from others is so precious to you, what does that tell us about where your sense of worth currently lives — and whether you would prefer it to live somewhere less vulnerable to the decisions of other people?

Perfectionism, Performance, and the 'Not Good Enough' Discourse

Perfectionism and Performance are not personality traits. In narrative terms, they arediscourses— cultural and psychological practices that have been internalised and have begun to act as internal narrators. They are first cousins of the pervasive 'Not Good Enough' discourse that settles quietly into shoulders, chests and stomachs and shapes vocation, relationship and self-perception.

What is particularly significant in Erin's case is that Perfectionism and Performance are likely to be strongly aligned with the Victim position. If she must be perfect, she must also beperfectly wronged. If she must perform, she must perform the injury with consistency and integrity. Any movement toward healing could be experienced as an imperfection in the story — a failure to perform the wound correctly.

The practitioner's response is not to challenge the performance, but to become curious about its history:How long has Perfectionism been in your life? Has there been a cost to having these companions? Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way Perfectionism is currently managing your recovery from this experience?

She Was Never Only a Victim

Allan Wade, whose response-based practice has enriched narrative approaches for decades, begins with a founding premise: wherever persons are badly treated, theyresist. This resistance is not always dramatic. It may be a refusal to change her posture when he enters the room. A deliberate choice of clothing that asserts her own aesthetic against his gaze. A private note to herself after each encounter. Filing the grievance, knowing the cost.

Each of these is an act of resistance. Each of these is evidence that Erin is not simply the object of the bully's discourse — she is a subject who has been responding to harm all along, with intelligence and agency.

"Dignity is not what they gave you. It is what you refused to hand over."

The shift is froma language of effectstoa language of responses. This is not about minimising harm. It is about restoring what the experience of harm has obscured: Erin's fundamental dignity and capacity for self-determination.

In the room, this might sound like this:"I notice that at every point where you could have been silent, you were not. You filed the grievance knowing the cost. You are here today, naming this, not swallowing it. What do you make of that?"

Working with Reluctance

Erin's 'I-don't-like-that!' refusals are not failures of the process. They are demonstrations of the very values the process hopes to bring forward: she has standards for what she will accept, she exercises her own authority in the room, and she refuses to be told what to do by yet another person in a position of relative power.

Her reluctance is not an obstacle to the alternative story. It is already part of it.

"Every 'I won't' is also an 'I will not surrender this.'"

The practitioner who works against this resistance will deepen it. The practitioner who becomes curious about it will find in it precisely the material from which an alternative story can begin to be built:"If your reluctance to feel safer could speak, what would it say it is afraid would happen?"

Re-enchanting Everyday Life

Re-enchanting everyday life does not mean pretending the harm did not happen. It means recovering the parts of daily existence that the harm has not yet colonised — and discovering that those parts are larger than the problem has led Erin to believe.

Amicro-acts of refusalinventory invites Erin to notice, over the coming week, small moments when she treated herself — her body, her space, her time, her voice — with the respect that he failed to offer. Not grand gestures. Small ones.

"Three moments this week when you refused to speak to yourself in the bully's voice. That is the practice."

A second practice develops the 'Erin-as-Protector' narrative — those moments when she has protected the dignity of others, called out disrespect in subtle ways, or continued to show up with integrity in a hostile environment. This is not a rebranding exercise. It is athickening of the story— an expansion of the description of who Erin is, beyond the thin account that both the Victim position and the organisational response have imposed.

"Re-enchantment is not pretending. It is recovering the parts of your life that the harm has not yet colonised."

The Curious Ethical Witness

The position available to the practitioner in this terrain — neither rescuer nor persecutor, neither applauding audience nor corrective authority — is that of thecurious ethical witness.

This position:

• Separates the validity of the harm from the evaluation of the responses to it."Your pain and anger make complete sense. I hold that without qualification. And I am also curious about whether every strategy that this harm has suggested to you is serving you as well as you deserve."

• Is transparent about its own ethics.The practitioner names clearly that she cannot be recruited into any position on the Drama Triangle — not Persecutor, not Rescuer, not Victim. This transparency is, paradoxically, a form of respect.

• Remains decentred.The practitioner is not the expert on Erin's life. She does not know better than Erin what Erin should feel, do, or choose. But she can ask questions Erin has not yet asked herself, and bear witness — with care and without flinching — to more of the story than Erin has yet been able to tell.

"I am not here to take sides. I am here to make sure all of your story gets told."

What the SSS Framework Offers

The SSS Framework —Safety, Story, Strategy— provides the navigational structure for all of this work. Not as a linear pipeline, but as a spiral: one that can be re-entered at any point, and whose movements can each be reimagined to honour where the client currently stands.

• Safetybecomes adversarial — protecting Erin's right to be angry rather than managing her anger away.

• Storybecomes expansive — widening the externalisation from one man's behaviour to the cultural discourses that injured many.

• Strategybecomes embodied — small daily acts of refusal and re-enchantment that do not require Erin to stop being angry, but invite her to direct that anger with precision and care.

The question the framework poses is not"How do we move Erin forward?"It is:"What form of Safety, Story and Strategy would Erin herself recognise as being in service of her own dignity?"

A Final Word

Erin is not only the woman who was called 'baby'. She is also the woman who refused to be silenced, who named the harm at personal cost, who filed the grievance knowing the risk, and who is sitting in a counsellor's chair reaching — even if she cannot yet admit it — toward something more than this.

The practitioner's work is to witness all of that. To hold it carefully. And to wait.

"The question is not 'Are you over it?' The question is: 'What have you kept, despite it?'"

François Wessels PhD is a pastoral therapist, spiritual director and life coach based in Pretoria, South Africa. He is the founder of ReSculpt and the developer of the SSS Framework (Safety, Story, Strategy) for narrative pastoral therapy and coaching. He works with individuals, practitioners and organisations navigating identity, story and transformation.

© François Wessels PhD | ReSculpt | 2026