The finger that points
I have a peeve with the therapy speak that occurs on social media. I mean it is fine that we talk about people pleasing, narcissism, gaslighting, boundaries and so on. That is fine. People getting to know terms is good, in a way. It gives them a way of expressing what they feel about themselves, what their guilty self says. Isn't it better to say “I am a people pleaser” than to give a long explanation and description of what they think they do?
The problem comes up when we start asking people to ‘cut off toxic people’ from their lives. Because then, whenever we meet anyone who disagrees with us, we call them toxic, narcissist, or anything of the sort. The finger that was pointed inwards now starts pointing outwards.
And this shift is what made me think again about Pine and Willow.
Most descriptions make them sound like two opposite personality types. Pine is guilt, Willow is resentment. Pine says “my fault,” Willow says “your fault.” Simple enough on paper. But real people don't usually stand neatly inside one of those two boxes. What I have seen more often is movement.
Someone may spend years carrying Pine. Maybe I should have done more. Maybe I was too harsh. Maybe I should have understood them better. Maybe I am the problem. The person keeps taking responsibility inwards, often far beyond what is actually theirs to carry.
Then something changes. Maybe they discover therapy language. Maybe someone tells them they were being manipulated. Maybe they learn the words narcissist, toxic, gaslighting, boundaries, and for the first time have language that tells them, hang on, maybe everything was not my fault. That can genuinely be useful, and for someone who has carried too much guilt for too long, it may even be necessary.
But the pendulum does not always stop in the middle. Sometimes it swings all the way to the other side, and the story becomes: after everything I did, look what they did to me. I was surrounded by toxic people. Nobody ever supported me. Why does this always happen to me? That is where Willow can begin to appear.
This is why I am not fully convinced by the usual way Pine and Willow get explained, as though both are simply sitting there side by side and all a practitioner needs to do is ask which one is present. In my own case work, I have rarely found both states strongly present together, as equals, at the same time. More often, Willow comes after Pine.
The person who once took too much responsibility for everything eventually discovers that maybe they were not responsible for all of it. That is a healthy correction, as far as it goes. But if the correction overshoots, responsibility does not disappear. It only changes direction. Earlier the question was, what is wrong with me? Now it becomes, what is wrong with everyone else? That is the shift worth watching for.
With Pine, the emotional weight keeps returning to what I should have done differently, with guilt and self-reproach that often extends to things that were never fully theirs to carry. With Willow, that weight has moved outside the self. The person keeps returning instead to what others did, how unfair life has been, how much they gave and how little came back, or why they always seem to be the one who suffers.
Resentment on its own isn't enough to call something Willow. Someone can be genuinely angry at having been treated badly. Someone can finally recognise that another person really did manipulate, neglect, or take advantage of them, and none of that automatically makes it Willow. What matters more is what has happened to their relationship with responsibility. Have they actually become more balanced, or has the entire weight simply moved from it is all my fault to it is all their fault? Those are two very different outcomes, even when they sound similar from the outside.
A woman may say she feels guilty after finally setting a boundary with her mother for the first time. That doesn't automatically mean Pine. She may simply be uncomfortable because she's never done it before, and discomfort with something new isn't the same as the old, familiar habit of taking on blame that isn't hers. Someone else may describe in detail how badly a partner treated them. That doesn't automatically mean Willow either. The partner may genuinely have behaved badly, and the person may simply be describing what happened, without yet living from that grievance the way Willow does.
There is also a version of this that isn't a slow shift over years but something closer to oscillation, someone swinging between guilt and blame within the same week, or the same conversation. That's worth naming on its own, separately from the slower Pine-to-Willow arc, because a swing that fast and that repeated can sometimes be part of a wider emotional or psychological picture rather than a straightforward shift in responsibility. Where that seems to be happening, it's worth staying alert to the bigger picture rather than reaching straight for a remedy.
Social media therapy language sits right in the middle of all this. Sometimes it gives someone a language they badly needed. Sometimes it helps them finally put down guilt that was never theirs to carry. And sometimes, without anyone quite noticing the handoff, it gives their resentment a vocabulary instead.
So the useful question isn't simply, do they feel guilty or do they feel resentful. The better question is, where has responsibility gone. Because Pine and Willow aren't always two different people walking into your consultation room. Sometimes they are two stages of the same person's story, arriving at different points along the way.
About the Author
Lt Col Abhinav Sharma, SM (Retd.) is a Bach Flower Remedies practitioner and educator at Soulvyom Research LLP. He teaches Bach Flower Remedies through a live Comprehensive Programme and also provides personalised BFR consultations. His teaching focuses not on learning the remedies, but on recognising and distinguishing similar emotional states and applying that knowledge to real conversations.
