The Cage We Choose: When Self-Blame Feels Safer Than Powerlessness
Recently, while I was reading Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, a striking experiment caught my attention: A rat is placed in a cage and given periodic shocks. In one version, the rat has a lever—it doesn’t stop the shocks, but the rat believes it helps. That rat, despite still being shocked, develops fewer stress-related health problems than a rat with no lever at all. The illusion of control helps protect against some of the damage caused by stress.
But here’s where the story gets more complicated, and more human: What happens when the lever the rat is pounding is self-blame?
The Paradox of Self-Blame
In my office, I’ve watched this pattern unfold countless times. A client stays in a job where they’re chronically undervalued. They recount story after story of being overlooked, criticized unfairly, or given impossible workloads. And then comes the turn: “But maybe if I just worked harder…” “If I were better at managing up…” “It’s probably my fault for not being clearer.”
Self-blame offers the seductive promise of control. If it’s your fault, then you have power. You could theoretically fix it. The alternative, that you’re in a situation where you genuinely lack control, where someone else’s dysfunction or an organization’s toxicity is the real problem, feels unbearable. That’s pure stress with no lever to press.
The rat with the useless lever gets fewer ulcers than the rat with no lever at all. We humans do the same calculation, often without realizing it. We choose the cage with the lever of self-blame over acknowledging our powerlessness.
The Cost of Our Lever
Imagine someone who stays in a relationship for years with a partner who is emotionally volatile and periodically cruel. They develop an elaborate internal system of rules: Don’t bring up difficult topics on weekends, watch their partner’s mood before asking for anything, be more supportive, more patient, more understanding. When things go wrong, and they often do, they have their lever: They must have broken one of their own rules. They must have been insufficient in some way.
The self-blame protects them from a more frightening truth: that they can’t control their partner’s behavior, that they’re pouring themselves into someone who might never meet them halfway, that they’re fundamentally not safe.
Unlike Sapolsky’s rats, though, we face an additional burden: Our self-blame doesn’t just fail to prevent the shocks. It adds new ones. The original stress compounds with shame, exhaustion from trying to be “enough,” and the slow erosion of self-trust. We’re getting shocked and we’re pressing a lever that tells us we deserve it.
The Cage Has No Lock
We can leave the cage.
The job that slowly crushes your spirit? You can quit. The relationship where you’re always wrong? You can end it. The family dynamic where you’re the designated problem? You can create distance. The friendship that’s become one-sided? You can let it fade.
“But it’s not that simple,” you might be thinking. And you’re right—it’s not simple. Leaving requires confronting the very powerlessness we’ve been avoiding. It means admitting that our lever of self-blame never worked, that we couldn’t love someone into treating us well, that we couldn’t perfect our way into an imperfect situation.
It means trading the exhausting certainty of “it’s my fault” for the terrifying uncertainty of “I don’t know what comes next.”
Building a Different Kind of Control
Real control isn’t about being able to fix every situation or relationship. It’s not about finding the right words, the right approach, the right version of yourself that will finally make things work.
Real control is recognizing which situations are genuinely changeable and which are not. It’s distinguishing between taking responsibility for your part in a dynamic—which is healthy and empowering—and taking blame for things that were never your’s to control, which is destructive and diminishing.
Think about someone who spends years trying to earn a parent’s approval. They change their career path, their life choices, even their personality—always adjusting, always hoping that the next version of themselves will finally be enough. Until one day, they realize they’ve been trying to solve a puzzle with missing pieces. The problem wasn’t their approach. The problem was that what they needed simply wasn’t available to give.
That realization is devastating. It’s also liberating.
Walking Out of the Cage
You might be reading this and recognizing yourself in these patterns. You might be gripping your lever of self-blame tightly, because letting go feels too frightening.
If that’s you, sit with this question: What if the cage you’re in is more painful than the uncertainty outside it? What if the control you think you have is costing you more than the powerlessness you’re avoiding?
The rats in the experiment had no choice. They couldn’t open the cage door and walk away from the shocks. But you can. The door has never been locked. It’s been open this whole time.
The question isn’t whether you can leave. It’s whether you’re ready to stop pressing the lever long enough to notice that you can.
Let’s talk. Therapy can help you step into real agency, not the illusion of it.
Click right HERE to learn more about Blake
Blake Overstreet, LPC, is a licensed professional therapist at Vervewell Counseling in Fort Worth, TX, specializing in therapy for teenagers (13+), young adults, adults, and couples. Blake empowers clients to deepen emotional resilience, cultivate meaningful relationships, foster personal growth, uncover purpose and meaning, and overcome self-imposed barriers.While operating primarily from a psychodynamic perspective, Blake also offers EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) for individuals dealing with post-traumatic stress. He sees clients in person and via telehealth across Texas.
