Over ten years ago I suffered from depression. I hadn’t encountered the monster much in the first 23 years of my life, if anything an occasional standoff. This time around it found me and attached its heavy body onto me, weighing me down into a darkness I had never experienced before. I am a very hopeful person, believing “all things work together for the good”. During my depression, these words did little to comfort me. They didn't connect. Words held little value. I struggled with the darkness for nearly four months. No friend, no family member, no church or organization, no government, no work, no book relieved me from my suffering I first blamed others for my struggle. I then blamed the church for not providing me the necessary tools to battle such a destructive monster. Finally I blamed myself, burying me in a dark guilt and shame. Others saw my struggle and wanted to help. They couldn’t, even those with the best intentions and self-proven strategies. Nothing worked in my favor. I was the victim of my never-ending circumstance.
This victim mindset became quite comfortable, though I knew it wasn't healthy. I much rather would have basked in my victim mindset than make a change. Change required entering into the unknown, a place that led me into my depression in the first place. Why would I want to enter that place again? At least my victim mindset was familiar and I knew what it would bring, even if it was a deeper depression. My dependence grew on something outside myself to change before I was to heal inside myself. I was expecting someone or something to “save me”.
Oh what heaviness I was in and couldn't escape.
What seemed to be a selfless act of self-denial turned out to be a very selfish one. I brought others down with me. I made others feel powerless around me. Most tragically, I threw away all the motivation I possessed to change myself. It took me four months to become aware of the addiction to my victim mindset, which buried me deeper and deeper. As soon as I became aware of the victim mindset I was holding, I started to rise out of the ashes. When I stopped feeling sorry for myself, my eyes opened to heaven. The world suddenly became much, much brighter.
The dark night of the soul leads one to the light if the victim mindset is LET-GO of.
One of my passions as a teacher is not to just teach students content but to empower them. I believe this is extremely important at the middle school level, where students are going through the greatest emotional, physical, mental, social and spiritual changes of their lives. I feel this is the age group that needs the most direction in self-love and self-empowerment. Sadly, many students coming into my classroom live in the victim mindset. When an issue arises, it’s common for middle school students to deny personal responsibility and make excuses for their behavior and blame others for their struggles. In their heads, they tell themselves they are the victims of their circumstances, perhaps “inherited”, or that they were wronged somehow. What’s fascinating is that over the course of a year I've witnessed students evolve from this victim-mindset to a growth-mindset that focuses on using obstacles to their advantage, as is the case of individuals like Albert Einstein, JK Rowling, Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jordan, Thomas Edison and Frederick Douglass. Middle schoolers aren’t the only ones who struggle with this victim mentality.
What a toxic environment we are all experiencing in 2020. It’s election season, and tensions are high (which is typical of election years) as party politics dominate the collective conversation. This year I’ve seen family members and friends take political sides, pointing the finger at the opposing side for the country’s current problems and building hatred towards one another. Add the fear of COVID-19 and you have people falling prey to victim mindsets everywhere. What's worse, we rely on modern media for truth and wisdom, to tell us what's reality and where our focus should be. Media has shown to stir peoples emotions up so much that they feel threatened by if not wronged by others who don't hold the same values as themselves. People begin to innately believe one side is good and the other side is bad, embracing one viewpoint and despising the other. Yet we long to live in a world of tolerance and peace, love and unity. Many of us follow these media outlets blindly without much introspection of our own internal games and mindsets. It seems we haven’t grown very much from a middle-school mentality after all.
As Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian leader who endured the trenches of struggle himself, once said, “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
Shit happens, and it sucks. Nobody deserves such tragedies. Don’t let this identify you. Grieve as you must, but don’t dwell on how you were wronged lest you want to create continuous suffering for yourself and for others. I once heard a saying at a conference that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. It may have been something that happened decades or centuries ago. As its replayed in the mind its relived over and over again as if it just happened, picking away a healing wound and bringing forth fresh blood. People addicted to the victim mindset can even feel pleasure when he or she receives attention or pity as a result of his or her past misfortune. I experienced this myself. I began to see how highly addictive and highly toxic to my soul the victim mindset is.
What good does blaming others create? What benefits are there to pointing the finger at others and ignoring your own internal struggles? What good does feeling sorry for yourself or for others manifest? All are temporary reliefs from a deeper, internal issue that’s poisoning your mind, body, and soul that will eventually bear its ugly head in your life.
We must find value in every soul, that they are doing the best they can with the circumstances presented to them. Self-love needs to be promoted first and foremost, then this same love will carry out to others and to the planet. The victim mentality does little to empower people to make positive changes in their lives. Instead, the victim mentality blinds the individual from self-reflection, inner-transformation and societal progress. It creates a needy soul, dependent on others to fix your problems and blames others when new problems arise. Is this the mindset you want driving your life? Instead of playing the victim card, perhaps we need to take a different approach to bring about change. Perhaps we need to look within.
All change starts within the individual and expands to the collective, not the other way around. If you have a desire to help those most in need, it must start with your own inner awareness and transformation. Are you willing to fully embrace the unknown, going beyond your own ego to connect to others and bring about positive change?
8 Strategies and Questions to Contemplate and Rid the Victim Mentality:
1. Identify your own victim mentality. When do you start to feel sorry for yourself?
2. Take responsibility for your own actions. Are you depending on others or organizations or movements to bail you out?
3. Stop blaming others for your circumstances. How would your life and the lives of others look if you loved others unconditionally?
4. Stop feeling sorry for yourself or others. How are pity and love different? Which one is more effective?
5. Drop GROUP identification and value yourself as an INDIVIDUAL. What makes YOU unique? How are you different than your profession, family, political affiliation, religion, race, ethnicity, gender? How are you a unique expression of God?
6. Avoid labeling others. Do you need to label others to feel unique?
7. Follow the GROW method. What is your main GOAL? What obstacles are holding you in your current REALITY? What OPTIONS do you have to move forward? Out of the options, which option will you take as your WAY FORWARD?
8. Focus on love. What is love? Am I loving myself and others by feeling sorry for myself?
If LOVE be your end goal, let LOVE drive you and vibrate from you and be your primary route of change.
Quotes:
“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”
Buddha
“A victim mentality is a prolonged form of suicide.”
Steve Maraboli
“Those with a perpetual victim mindset tend to create the situations from which they suffer.” \
Steve Maraboli
“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
Mahatma Gandhi.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Wayne Dyer
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