Storytelling Archetype

storyRNA Storytelling Archetype Profile Card

Victim

The storyteller who shares vulnerability to invite empathy, awareness, and transformation.


Vulnerable • Expressive • Sensitive

Core Storytelling Trait

You frame your stories around hardship, injustice, or struggle. Others often see you as someone who has endured and continues to push forward despite challenges. You convey your experiences of struggle, pain, or injustice with honesty and emotion. Your stories make others feel the weight of difficulty while highlighting the need for empathy, reflection, and change.

Power Lens & Narrative Evolution: The Power of Vulnerability

Your natural source of power lies in your emotional honesty, with the courage to speak from your wounds, not to seek sympathy, but to find strength. From the raw vulnerability of the Victim comes the awakening of The Survivor, where you transform pain into purpose and vulnerability into resilience. You tell stories that don’t just expose what hurt.  You show what healed. Your rawness draws people in, but it’s your transformation that keeps them there. You remind others that struggle isn’t the end of the story; it’s the turning point. Through your voice, pain becomes power, and every scar becomes a testament to survival.

Growth Tip

Shift the focus from what hurt you to how you overcame it. People remember the victory more than the wound. Pair vulnerability with resilience and show both the struggle and the lessons or growth it brings to inspire hope. 

  • Creates instant empathy, inspires loyalty, makes audiences feel protective.

    o    Brings empathy through honesty about struggle

    o    Powerful at highlighting injustices

    o    Makes invisible pain visible

    o    Invites healing and accountability

    o    Invites others into shared emotional experience

  • Over-identifying with pain can trap you in cycles of retelling suffering rather than showing growth. It can come across as one who suffers at the hands of others or of fate, always wronged, misunderstood or unlucky.  Can wear listeners out with negativity and risks reinforcing others’ sense of helplessness.

    • Leadership: Share stories of struggle to model resilience. Use personal stories to cultivate awareness, empathy, and connection within teams. Can evoke sympathy to rally support.

    • Business: Your transparency builds trust. Teams believe you because you’ve lived it. Excellent for advocacy, mentoring, and storytelling that highlights human experiences.

    • Relationships: Vulnerability makes others feel safe to open up. Fosters deep connection by modeling authenticity and emotional courage.

  • You connect through vulnerability, seeking emotional closeness and safety by opening your wounds and inviting others to witness your pain. Sharing struggle is how you test for empathy, reassurance, and understanding. 

    It’s a way of asking, "Will you take care of me? Can you hold space for what I'm carrying?" When someone responds with genuine care, the bond can deepen quickly, creating profound intimacy built on trust and emotional attunement.

    At your best, this openness is a gift. It signals courage, emotional honesty, and a willingness to be seen in your most tender moments. People feel honored to be trusted with your truth, and the connection that forms can be deeply meaningful: raw, real, and unguarded in ways that superficial interactions never achieve.

    But when unbalanced, vulnerability becomes a weight others must carry. What begins as protective instinct, the desire to comfort and support, can shift into exhaustion as the emotional demands accumulate.

    Listeners may find themselves in the role of constant caretaker, their own needs sidelined, the relationship becoming less about mutual exchange and more about managing your pain. They care, but they're also drained.

    In intimate settings or on dates, you create immediate emotional intensity. Sharing your struggles early can make someone feel chosen, needed, and deeply connected to you. But it can also feel heavy or premature, like being asked to rescue before you've even gotten to know each other.

    The question becomes: Are they connecting with you as a whole person, or are they connecting with your need?

    The evolution happens when you're met with genuine care rather than pity, and when you learn to offer yourself, not just your pain, as the foundation of intimacy.

    True connection isn't built solely on being held; it's built on mutual presence, where vulnerability flows both ways and closeness doesn't require crisis.

Your Gift

Your gift is teaching compassion and courage by giving voice to suffering that others might hide. Through your willingness to speak what's difficult, you help people recognize that vulnerability isn't weakness.  It's transformation waiting to happen. You model emotional bravery, showing that pain can be shared, held, and eventually integrated into a larger story of resilience.

When you share your struggles authentically, you create permission for others to do the same. You teach empathy by inviting people into the tender places they might otherwise avoid, helping them develop the capacity to sit with discomfort—both their own and others’. Your openness becomes a bridge, reminding everyone that being human means being imperfect, wounded, and still worthy of love.

At its highest expression, your vulnerability isn't just about being seen in your pain—it's about honoring the power of that pain to connect, heal, and awaken something deeper in those who witness it. You help others understand that transformation often begins exactly where we feel most broken.