Being made a victim changes people. A victim is someone who is forced into a powerless position while someone else crosses their boundaries and demonstrates power over them. That is like a hammer blow on our soul. It gets a dent. If it repeats the soul starts to change its shape and bend, a pattern becomes visible that is the souls way to absorb those terrible blows.
It is „a pattern of thinking, feeling and acting based on a set of beliefs about the universe.This set of beliefs is a paradigm that defines our expectation for what we experience and what is possible. It defines our reality. It is like a map, laying out the geography of our world and showing us the various routes available to us through life.“ (Stephen Da Silva)
It might look like this:
Housing: you live in the first place you could get. It might be run down or too expensive for you, so you can’t afford the heating in winter. You struggle to take care of it. When something breaks you don’t get it repaired, you just work around it until you get used to it. If you have friends over you have to give them instructions on how to use your method. You are too anxious to call the landlord and moving seems too stressful.
Job: you can’t remember why you learned the trade you work in. It was probably someone elses idea. You are constantly working overtime, feeling important but complaining about it. You might not get paid well. Your boss is a mean man who yells at you. You can’t do things right enough. Your fear of making mistakes is crippling your ability to work. You might expect punishment from your boss, you might even feel relief when you are punished because that is what things should be like in your world. Co-workers hate you and talk behind your back. You end up changing jobs all the time cause you can’t take it anymore.
Therapy: you are scared of your T. They seem to know everything and they say hard things to you all the time. They don’t have any empathy. You often leave crushed and hopeless and want to die. How can they do that to you, you thought they were your friend.
You are also very angry with your T. They don’t do enough. They should have fixed you by now. They should let you call them every night when you are having a panic attack. Maybe you should threaten to leave them.
Let’s take a closer look at the pieces that create this pattern, this inner map of the world, that leads us into this life.
Deep sense of being „wrong“, dirty, not enough, too much, bad, unworthy, undeserving… even breathing or taking up space is more than you think you deserve. If people knew the real you they would leave, so you hide behind a mask.
Chronic helplessness:
You feel like you don’t have a choice, life is more powerful than you and forces you into situations where you „have to“ all the time, but you can’t. You don’t know what to do. Murphy’s law applies: all bad things happen to you, you find yourself in abusive situations repeatedly. Because you can’t cope alone you are dependent on others to help you even with small things and daily life.
Chronic overwhelm
Life is too hard, your emotions are too intense, you find that you can’t manage yourself. You are drowning in your fears, get scared of your own outbursts of anger, freeze in sadness and depression and become unable to do anything challenging. You have to rely on someone or something to save you from yourself. You might tell people all about what triggers you but they keep making mistakes and overwhelm you again.
Indifference
You find yourself unable to do proper self-care. You forget meals or showers, you lose interest in life, hobbies, relationships, going outside and you can’t find the strength to care about it for long. If you try to make things better, helplessness and overwhelm stop you. This can even get to the place where you can’t find it in you to care about the fact that you are still in an abusive relationship. Even bad situations seem alright to you because you just can’t care more. You are passive.
Anger & Blame:
You feel a lot of anger and resentment. Maybe about your parents, your boss, your government or society or some people-group. Someone is the „bad guy“ in this story and you know exactly whose fault it all is. You are outraged about newspaper articles, gossip a lot about other people and you can spend a whole day in frustration about a small thing. Some people tell you that they are intimidated by your outbursts of anger. They tip-toe around you to avoid another explosion.
Justice:
You don’t believe that there is justice in the world. That is why you create your own little justice by bending the laws/rules. They don’t apply for you as they do for others, you have special rights because you had to endure so much injustice. Now you can make up for it. You expect exceptions to be made for you. You are dishonest about finances, you might even steal and consider that corrective justice. Your conviction that rules are not for you gets you into trouble over and over again but because of your pattern of blame it is always someone elses fault.
Boundaries
You don’t have a concept of healthy boundaries. This can show in two different ways.
You might tell people you just met all about your abuse story or diagnosis. You allow people access to your life without checking if they are safe. You can’t say no to anyone or anything, so you end up giving away things you need while you receive things that harm you. You don’t confront disrespectful behavior out of fear of being left. Everyone can pretty much do with you whatever they want and you won’t object.
You might go into another extreme and not let anyone get close. Maybe your boundaries have become walls that shut out love, intimacy and true connection. You seem cold, distant, rational and self-sufficient. You never share anything meaningful with anyone and even after years of contact people feel like they don’t know you. You might have been called arrogant.
Trust
This too can go into two direction. Maybe you trust everyone and therefore you get ripped off a lot. You open yourself for harmful relationships, fraud and being used by others. You never saw it coming, but this new boyfriend ran off with your money. Turns out he was addicted. How could you have known?
On the other hand you might not trust anyone ever. You are always watching everyone closely, always expecting the worst. Being around people means being tense and on guard, nobody has good intentions.
Self-management
Tt might seem natural to you that your life is out of control. You are always behind with cleaning your dishes, you don’t manage to ever be on time, you miss deadlines for work or taxes regularly, you can’t find things and you are in debt while you don’t even own anything expensive. Helplessness and overwhelm cause this to be a chronic condition. You are riding a horse at a full gallop, clinging to the mane cause you can’t get hold of the reins. Maybe you tell people that this is „who you are“ and that they need to accept it.
Opportunism
You keep changing paths whenever you see an opportunity for a quick fix, a small relief in some area of your life. You change yourself to fit the circumstances, chosing the path of least resistance at the cost of being true to your values or purpose in life. If you find an open door, you take it.You live by short-term goals of having an easy time now without seeing the long-term costs or even the direction you are going. You have no goals and you don’t take risks.
Pity & self-pity
You have a thorough understanding of how unfair and mean life is to you. Maybe you tend to whine, especially in the presence of others. Hearing them agree with you, that you are miserable and to be pitied, makes you feel heard and understood. At least someone who understands! How cozy and nice. It stops feeling nice when they start to make suggestions what you could change to get better. Then they don’t understand! You can’t get better (see helplessness)
Black& white thinking
In any category of life you can separate things into good and bad. There are no grey areas. You have made up your mind. Science might say something different, but you know better. You world crumbles when someone suddenly changes the sides and becomes „bad“ because they did something you didn’t expect. You thought you knew them.
Hope
There is little room for hope in your chronically negative thinking. You expect bad things. You don’t have the ability to dream for the future. Your mind goes blank or fills with pictures of disaster or suicide. You are pretty sure that things won’t get better and if they do you are unable to see it because they are not perfect yet. If there is hope you place it on another person to save you or other external factors, not on your own abilities.
Relationships
There is always a power imbalance in your relationships. You are either aggressive, passive or passive-aggressive. Often manipulation replaces open communication. You expect others to be able to read your mind and know things you never expressed. Your relationship dynamics are based on triangulation. The main idea is having resources, not connection. You have been told that you are controlling but you were just trying to express your needs to someone. You might have no idea what friends do when they spend time together.
The sum of this is often referred to as „victim mentality“. I hate that phrase. Especially in the church it has been used to tell people that they could just renounce this and suddenly they will be different.
It doesn’t work that way. It’s not just a thought, its engraved into the soul by trauma.
Even just becoming aware that this is a pattern in your soul is a great achievement. Usually all this feels so normal that we don’t even notice that there might be something off.
I want you to know that there is no reason to be ashamed of being this way. It is the natural response to trauma. I have not met a single trauma patient who did not show signs of this pattern. It is part of your disorder, not part of you. A disorder, or a bent in your soul, doesn’t make you a bad person.
It might make you a person who is difficult for others to be around with. (If you are reading this and you are not traumatized, please understand that nobody chooses to get this way. Please don’t judge.)
You didn’t get this way by choice, but you decide if you want to stay this way.
Some people with this kind of bent find other people whose bent somehow matches theirs. They enter a co-dependent relationship. One gets to be „powerful“ in the relationship while the other one takes a powerless position. This works really well as long as nobody changes or heals. If you decide to stay in a familiar pattern in your relationships it means that you decide to nurture your trauma for the rest of your life. You can’t get better if you embrace your bent. In this case you cannot really call yourself a „survivor“. You are really a victim and you stay one by choice.
The bent is not your fault, but it ends up being your responsibility. The bent is made of core beliefs you learned to survive. They don’t apply to today. They actually cause a lot of difficulties today. You can challenge your belief-system and re-shape your inner patterns, your map of this universe. You need to find out the truth about yourself, others and the world. Don’t give up. It takes time and you will need the help of people with a different map to help you. On the other side of this is freedom, happiness, strong relationships, self-control and a life worth living.
A book that has helped us on our path is „Keep your love on“ by Danny Silk. We too are still working on changing patterns.
Here is an exercise that will train you to overcome helplessness
More about core values of a true survivor:
Leave a Reply