There are situations in which people intentionally or culpably provoke others beyond endurance, and then blame them when they react.
And something people who do this often say is that people have to take responsibility for their actions. Which is true, but it’s also more complicated than that.
See this post on Ballastexistenz:
My new case manager was a young woman. She was organized and efficient. And within a month or so, she completely turned my life around. I could finally rest, because I no longer had to keep a constant lookout for things going wrong.And my reputation changed. Suddenly they considered me reasonable, polite, and civil.
They acted as if I was the one who had changed. But I wasn’t. What changed was my situation. It’s hard to be nice — hell, literally fatal to be nice — when it’s your life on the line, when there’s a different crisis or three every week.Yet that’s exactly the position a lot of agencies force disabled people into. They don’t provide adequate case management, and the outcome becomes our fault. We are forced to fight for basic necessities. When we do fight, they take that as evidence that we are capable of keeping track of our own needs without any extra assistance. We become not their problem.
So – while, people are real all the time, and whatever people do, they’re the one who did it – sometimes the solution to problems involves changing what *other* people are doing. And that piece is also important.