To Be Or Not To Be A Victim Pt. 2

It had been almost a year and half since I’d started working on this psychological issue. It was becoming less of a problem, and I had made some terrific adjustments to my life. But it was still coming up. I started noticing myself pushing the victim back down, squashing it, and replacing it with this dynamo-mega-super-woman who was in charge, responsible and totally cool.

But that started breaking down. Super woman wasn’t winning, she was losing. The inner victim is vicious and really powerful.

The problem is that fundamentally we don’t change. We can sometimes change some habits or beliefs, but we can’t change who we are underneath it all. And the victim is a part of my personal experience. It was developed within me as a child, a tiny child, and so it is a fundamental part of my foundation.

Acceptance
One day I became so frustrated with it, thinking it would never end, and I asked, almost out loud in exasperation, ‘How do I completely get rid of my inner victim?!?’

And then these words started flooding into my head, and I sort of felt like I was channeling some inner guru, wisdom, or even a guiding spirit. I asked this inner voice to hold on a minute so that I could find a pen and paper to write it down, and it did (it was funny). This is what it said:

“These parts of ourselves they never really go away, you can’t completely relinquish them forever, as they are a part of you. Trying to relinquish them is resistance, and resistance is why you have been experiencing all of this suffering. You can’t just “get rid” of a part of you that you decided to be born into. We say there is no bad or good, and we mean that to us it all creates the picture. You know that in your art this is true, the light supports the dark and vice versa. You can’t have a good work of art without a dark shape.

You can’t just cut off your arm because it’s shaped differently or it’s too hairy. You are less without it. However, you can learn to tame the dark. You can look at those instincts and traits that don’t serve you and make friends with them, get them on your side advocating for you. In the case of the victim within you, you get lost in its negativity sometimes, and it leads you to dark, un-fun places.

Instead, send your victim love and light. It will always work. Your victim is here for you. She is a part of you. You need her. She teaches you about this world, about human nature. Don’t hate her and wish she wasn’t there, don’t reject a part of yourself. She has thus far taught you many lessons. Your soul has learned. Send her gratitude. Love her. She will take up a place in your heart that is useful and calm. She will point out for you when the danger of an abusive situation arises or when someone else feels victimized and needs help. Love her and she will bring you strength and confidence”.

How to send love to a part of you

When these ideas came through to me it partly made sense because I had watched a video with Mantak Chia on how to send love to your organs, and I had begun doing that to heal my digestive system. I’m including two videos below on meditations for sending love, because I think that this practice is incredibly powerful if we can hone it. (The second one is a little dorky, but it totally works! Bear with it).

Mantak Chia

Dawson Church’s Heart Meditation

Acceptance can be very, very difficult. I suggest to sit with the problem and just consider what it would be like to accept it. Try to accept a little of it at first if it’s hard. Realize that at this moment, the problem exists there with you whether you like it or not, and so really the only sane choice is acceptance, at least in that moment. Try to make it okay for the problem to be there. Be okay with it.

The irony of acceptance vs. resistance is that oftentimes the issue (the pain, the disease, the repeating bad relationships, etc) is there because of a nonacceptance of something inherent to yourself. Especially with disease. Disease is often caused by us rejecting some part of ourselves. I did not want to accept that it was okay for me to feel entirely crappy all day. But not accepting this was making me feel worse. In the end I had to learn to accept that in this moment in my life this is what I’ve been given. That this is a part of my path, and that I am learning something from it.

This doesn’t mean that we should accept abuse from other people, it simply means we must accept whatever life has laid in our path in this moment, the things we can’t change, and then make decisions on where to go from there.

Get In Touch With Your Inner Child

This one feels really cheezy. I had a hard time with it, a very hard time at first. But eventually, and I’m talking years later, I got over that and just did it.

I learned this technique from a psychiatrist many years ago. She told me that I needed to sit quietly and allow the feelings I was feeling (the bad ones) to flood into me. Then ask inside of my mind, “Whose feelings are these?” And feel and listen to the answer. It is usually a smaller version of yourself, when you are little.

You then talk to that child, and you tell her how sorry you are these things happened to them, and you comfort them. You can ask them why they are sad or angry or whatever, and you comfort them and comfort them. You cry with them. You tell them you’ll never leave them and you are always here for them. You develop a relationship with them over time. A loving one. Be the parent that you wish you had had.

You’ll also grow apart and forget about the inner child, and then years later have them re-emerge again with similar or even the same problems, and you begin the whole process again. Again and Again. And over time, you slowly heal your deep inner wounds. You fill them up with love.

Accept the slowness of time and change

The journey to heal our inner victims is slow. And you must allow it to be slow. You must savor the slowness, like you’re watching a baby grow. Savor every new thought that comes to you that allows you to grow and mature even just a little. Savor the person you are right now no matter how “bad” you might think it is, because it is an important part of this path you are on. These things are like winding and bumpy paths to beautiful places deep in forests or mountains. Yes they are hard, but like hiking up a mountain, it truly is neutral. There really isn’t a good or bad, just a harder section of the path. Trust that it will change over time with your effort, attention, and love.

And enjoy it. Enjoy the little things in your life in this moment, because the moment is changing and soon will be gone. Whatever it is about yourself you don’t currently like, decide to enjoy it anyway, while it lasts, and try to love it. It is a part of you. It has a purpose in your life. It is your soul’s creation, it is here for a reason, and it will teach you important things. Don’t dishonor it by declaring it completely black-and-white “bad”. Trust that it is there for a reason.

Allow yourself time, because healing takes time. Impatience is like rubbing the wound raw all of the time… it takes longer to heal and you just end up with a giant scar.

To Be or Not To Be, A Victim Pt. 1

The time has come for all of us to wake up to the things that are holding us back from evolving into better people. And in my humble opinion, our personal inner victim provides one of the bigger hurdles we each must overcome.

For me, the realization that I had a problem with victimization began with my experiences with doctors. I started to notice that doctors made me feel a particular way. A very particular way.

In the year 2017 I was seeing a lot of doctors, and they always made me feel this weird, helpless neediness. At first I thought I just wasn’t able to communicate with them properly; what I was feeling, how important certain symptoms were, or what I thought was the causes. They treated me like my opinion didn’t matter and that what I thought and felt happening in my own body was obviously way below them. They made me feel helpless and misunderstood.

What was so important for my life to function just didn’t seem nearly as important to them. They didn’t seem to care much that I was not functioning. To them it was just another day at work.

The big moment came when I realized that this strange feeling, this inability to express the importance of the situation to these gods of medicine, this feeling of neglect and frustration, felt that same as many moments in my childhood. There had been many times in when my needs just weren’t that important to my parents. Sometimes this included needing food or medical care.

So you can see how the inner victim was being activated: Being totally reliant upon an authority figure to solve my problems – important problems that were severely impacting my life. Then this authority figure ignores or denies its importance, acting like it’s mundane. It made me feel the same small, stupid, helpless way I felt as a child. A victim.

We all have an inner victim, our own personalized sense of feeling small, unimportant, abused, sad and sorry for ourselves, bullied or unworthy. Our entire culture follows a model of abuser/victim to some extent. Our movies and books are often about abusers and the victim’s journey of retaliation, overcoming, or justice. Our justice system certainly divides people into black and white categories of victims vs perpetrators. And we often judge people as being good or bad based upon all sorts of things from personal habits, religious beliefs, or political affiliations. But it’s not all black and white. It’s really all gray. You are just as gray as the person at work you think is a terrible guy for voting for Trump, or the ex that dumped you for someone you think is totally shallow.

How to recognize your inner victim

I think the first step in understanding how to deal with your inner victim is simply recognizing it.

To do this, pay attention to what makes you feel small. Is it your boss, being overwhelmed, or ignored? Just start to notice it, and then try to figure out what it all has in common. Especially if something makes you feel a very familiar way… consider if it is something you’ve been feeling for a very long time. How long? Since childhood or adulthood? Figure out the common thread, the element that sets off those feelings in you.

For example, my inner victim is activated when someone is blocking my own expression of my needs. When I am trying to express something that is important to me and the other person is not taking me seriously, that is what really gets me feeling small and frustrated. When something important to me is ignored or diminished. That is what brings out my inner cry baby and I get whiny, depressed, and super needy.

So what do you do next?

At the time that I had this realization I thought ‘oh good, now that I realize this it’ll just magically go away… right? Nope.

Suddenly all sorts of crazy stuff happened in my life that brought it. Once I realized that I had this victim, this reaction, everything blew up. It was almost as if it threw a temper tantrum. It was like my inner victim had a victim festival and everything that could go wrong went wrong and I felt terrible… my health got really bad, a trip I was planning started falling apart, and nothing was going right. I felt sorry for myself, I wanted everyone around me to feel sorry for me, I cried, I complained, I wanted everyone to understand and feel my suffering and I wished for someone else to fix it.

Taking Responsibility

The first, most obvious thought for me was ‘what’s the opposite of feeling victimized? … Feeling in charge. How can I feel ‘in charge’? … By taking responsibility’.

So I started taking responsibility for all of the crap in my life that was going wrong. I decided that everything that was happening to me was my problem and only my problem. Btw, this wasn’t all that easy.

I then took a look that the whole picture and figured out what options were available (ie: what is in my control), and then started making decisions. It’s not within my control to make a doctor care about my problems. It is in my control whether or not to see that doctor again. And so now I don’t go to a doctor when I have problems unless I need something from them… an evaluation, some testing, or an idea of what options or remedies are available. But making myself well is my task, the doctor is just a tool.

Taking responsibility doesn’t mean that you don’t ask for help. It means that when you ask for help, it’s more like asking someone to help you with your problem, rather than asking them to take the problem away from you.

The other thing about taking responsibility is that you can’t do it with resentment for the people who aren’t there helping you. Don’t use it to become a martyr. If martyrdom is something you tend to do, continue reminding yourself that this is not anyone else’s problem to deal with, that everyone else has their own burdens to bear, and this one is yours to figure out.

I suggest if you have problems with this concept make it a mantra or an affirmation for a while… “I take full responsibility for my own well being”.

Quit Complaining

Complaining is a way to wallow in victimization. It contains a sort of wish to give up and dump your shit onto someone else. It also relays the idea to both yourself and the people you complain to that you receive love through sympathy (which insinuates that bad stuff has to happen to you for you to receive love). Plus it makes people feel a sense of guilt alongside helplessness, which isn’t healthy for anyone. All of this – people feeling sorry for you, wishing to dump your shit off on others, and needing love through sympathy – puts you in a powerless position and manifests more of what makes you a victim. In the end complaining gives the victim negative power, and allows you to wallow in feelings of smallness and abuse. We don’t want this.

There is a difference, by the way, between complaining, and relaying a story, or getting something off your chest. Both of the later come with an attitude of aloofness, or even joviality, over the situation. I recently had a friend call to tell me about a really bad day he had just experienced. Everything that could go wrong had in such an extreme way that it was like a movie. When he told me about it it was with a lighthearted hilarity, like telling an entertaining story, and he himself had remained fairly calm throughout the myriad of crazy things that had happened.

It’s the difference between explaining something or telling a story to someone and whining about it. Telling a story implies that you keep it your own even while asking for help or advice. Whining is trying to make it everyone else’s problem.

The results of simply not complaining have been rather amazing. I suffered for years from terrible, debilitating insomnia. When I quit complaining it got about 90% better.

Stand Up For Yourself * Setting Boundaries

Standing up for yourself is basically all about setting a boundary. Many of us who are dealing with victim issues also have major boundary issues. A boundary is a line between what you do and don’t like. I like flirting with you, I don’t like you creeping on me. I like having pleasant conversations with you, I don’t like it when you call me a name or say something negative about me.

Many of us have massive boundary issues with our families. Family is really where the boundaries were created or abused in the first place. And so this will be the area that is the most difficult. You may even need to stop talking with certain family members for a while, or even always.

But start with figuring out what hurts your feelings or what doesn’t feel good. I have a family members that can be really verbally mean. So whenever that happens I just say “I don’t like that, that statement isn’t true, and it’s not okay for you to say that about me”. This has worked for me, but my family is also somewhat aware and always trying to be better people despite their occasional flaws.

I really like the conversation around difficult family relationships here with Dr. Nicole Lepera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zc00EYi51k

Healing the inner victim takes much time and patience. This is just the beginning, these are only first steps, and steps you will take over and over again. We are always learning, always changing.

Other steps along the way include acceptance and healing deep inner wounds, which will have to be discussed in part 2.

In the meantime, thanks for listening!