Breaking Free: Overcoming the Victim Mentality

"Why did you come to see me today?" I asked Daphna.

"I want to divorce Ron! I'm not happy with him. He constantly does things that hurt me. He often takes the kids' side, and everyone is against me. If you knew how my daughter speaks to me, you would understand exactly what I mean... If we divorce, at least I'll stop suffering like this," Daphna explained.

"It’s really hard to live in a relationship that comes with so much suffering. What were your relationships like with your parents and siblings?" I continued to inquire.

"My parents were sick and miserable. I had to be the parental child, taking care of both my parents and my siblings."

"That's a heavy burden on such small shoulders. You hardly had time to be a kid. Do you have good friends?"

"I have friends, but I don’t know if I would define them as good. At some point, I always feel that they have interests of their own, and I find myself giving and giving without knowing if they even appreciate it."

"From everything you’ve told me, it doesn’t sound like you just want to divorce Ron. It seems like there's a whole world from which you need to divorce yourself."

"What world?" she asked.

"The world of victimhood."

"I really am a victim of everyone somehow. I don’t understand, how does this happen over and over?"

"The mechanism of victimhood develops and prevents us from being proactive. It sounds like in your childhood, you experienced injustice. Since you were truly powerless, you felt very strong as a victim, and that’s justified. It’s not fair for such a small child to be parental instead of experiencing a childhood filled with joy, freedom, and liberation.

"This mechanism continues to accompany us into adulthood. It gives us the illusion that the more we hold on to the fact that we’ve been wronged and that we are innocent, the less pain we will feel. As long as we identify ourselves as victims of the situation, it allows us to transfer blame and responsibility to others. This mechanism was created in your childhood, and you continued to adopt it as an adult; it keeps giving you that feeling of powerlessness..."

"Why would I want to continue feeling powerless?" she asked in surprise.

"Unconsciously, in powerlessness, there is a security that allows one to keep searching for someone or something to blame, including oneself. There's a significant secondary gain here."

"What gain?" she asked.

"By not being responsible for my pain, there’s something very liberating and calming about it. The problem is that it keeps us mired in the past, in pain and loss of what we cannot change, and we insist on not coming to terms with the past.

"The sense of victimhood is a false reprieve. It stunts our growth and development (growth often comes with pain), and the longer we stay there – the harder it becomes to leave that place."

"But why would I want to stay in that place?" she asked.

"Independence and freedom come with a price of responsibility. The sense of victimhood is like a license not to take on that responsibility. The initial change has to be an agreement to give up this secondary gain of victimhood, and only then can a change in perspective be allowed."

"What kind of change?"

"A change in perspective that each of us has the option to choose whether to remain a victim or to respond in a healthy and growth-oriented way to everything that happens to us. We can be hurt and innocent on one hand and take responsibility for our lives on the other."

"I understand this, but I can’t. Please give me practical tools to help me," she burst into tears.

"Changes need to happen first and foremost within your soul. You need to learn to agree to give up that gain; otherwise, no change in perspective or intellectual explanations will help.

"You need to confront the hurt and abandoned child within you, give her the feeling that we will take her out of the darkness and give her plenty of love and security.

"The only way is to learn to stop fighting and resisting. Only this will allow the energy to flow and enable you to have compassion for yourself. You will learn to recognize if this rigid behavior within the cycle of victimhood weakens or empowers you, and only then will you be able to take this crisis in both hands and allow change to happen."

Hanna Dayan[email protected]

For all columns and contact,click here