Victim Mindset 101
“Why does bad stuff happen to me? What did I do to deserve it? This isn’t fair! Shouldn’t life be different? I did X...why didn’t Y happen as a result? ”
Ahhh, the victim’s mindset. It is one I know well…very well. While I did not know it, I spent most of my life operating with a victim mindset. I still fall into its trap from time to time, but over the past couple years I have developed a few tools that have helped me avoid it more regularly, pinpoint it sooner, reframe my thoughts and storyline, and turn it around to a more empowered mindset. This is a complex, personal, tricky subject but one that I am committed to exploring in this blog given the impact it has had on my life, and my firm belief that fitness is a powerful vehicle for inner change. Due to the difficult subject matter, I wanted to use this post to simply begin describing what a victim mindset is and where my own mindset journey starts. Many, many more posts to come on this subject.
To be clear: when I say “victim’s mindset,” I mean that of someone who is not a victim of an actual crime such as rape, domestic abuse, discrimination, or persecution, or even someone who has been hurt in an accident or tragedy or is battling a serious illness. That is the reality of being a victim; it is not a mindset. No one actually wants to be a victim, and yet many of us fall prey to the victim’s mindset. Not only is it a disservice to our own lives, it also makes light of the very dark reality of true victimhood.
There are a few common qualities that can be present in a victim mindset:
- Life events, big or small, good or bad, are somehow about you
- A belief in the inherent fairness or unfairness of what happens
- The idea that things should be a certain way, and often this should is the opposite of what is actually happening
- An attempt to gain control over life so as to fix the “shoulds” or the “unfairness”
- General neuroticism: moodiness, envy, frustration, fear, worry, jealousy, loneliness, anxiety
Now, I have struggled significantly throughout my life with clinical depression and general anxiety, and in high school I battled anorexia nervosa (followed by several years of disordered eating and body image). But here’s my personal truth: while genetics and chemical imbalances absolutely played a part, by and large my extreme depression and anxiety were symptoms of my mindset. I believed I was broken, so therefore I broke.
Here’s the honest, tough-to-fess-up-to truth: I wanted to be a victim. (Ouch – it hurts to even type that.) I wanted to believe that something was fundamentally wrong with me so that I didn’t have to fully show up in life. I was afraid. I struggled as a frozen perfectionist – you know, the kind of perfectionist who are so fearful of failing that they simply don’t do shit – and instead of owning up to that, it was easier to limit and label myself.
This hit home for me a few years ago; I was in therapy for my clinical depression and anxiety. (Important side note: please, if you struggle with any mental illness at all or suspect you may be depressed, seek a good mental health professional. Therapy and/or medication are often an important starting point, and work well alongside mindset coaching.) My therapist and I were determining if I had a comorbid condition that shall not be named. Although I did not even admit this to myself at the time, I secretly hoped for the diagnosis. I mean, hey, it’s kind of interesting to have an unusual mental illness, right? Nothing unusual about depression and anxiety, after all. And surely that will allow me to embrace my victimhood…like having a free pass! Again, this is sad and really embarrassing to even admit, since it doesn’t respect those who actually have this disorder. Of course, it was determined that I did not have the comorbid condition. Months later, after I started Neghar Fonooni’s coaching program and had HUGE revelations in my mindset practice, I one day randomly thought back to the diagnosis question. Without time to realize it, I said out loud to myself, “I’m not looking to be depressed and [condition] anymore.”
DID YOU HEAR THAT?
It slapped me upside the face. I had never realized that I was seeking victimhood, essentially creating non-existent struggle for myself, until I said it without any filter. Of course, depression and anxiety are significant struggles already, and certainly not ones to be minimized. But to me, it didn’t seem “special” enough; everyone told me it was normal to be depressed and anxious. Not enough of an excuse for hiding behind my fear. Not enough for people to feel sorry for me.
I wanted to be a victim. But was I…am I? Once I more closely (and honestly) examined the situation, here’s what I discovered:
- I’m enormously privileged. Creating victimhood is not only NOT reality, it distracts me from taking action that can leverage my privilege for creating positive impact. If I label yourself a victim, how can I ever believe in my own power?
- I had never truly challenged myself. I coasted through my life and did not excel in anything. I also never truly failed, because I hadn’t attempted enough to fail. I was frozen. I held myself back by believing that I was inherently broken (while also, paradoxically, believing that I should be “perfect.” Go figure!).
- Even true victims survive and THRIVE when they don’t label themselves as such. I’ve spent the past few years studying and learning from people who haven risen up from the ashes. The one thing they all have in common is the belief that they are not defined by their struggle, but rather the sum of their effort and their attitude. You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again: You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it.
- Key words that my thoughts said to me were a disservice to my mindset: should and fair. Learning how to not automatically believe the stories my thoughts tell me was a milestone in my mindset evolution; more on this in a future blog post. Once I started questioning my thoughts, I realized that I often believed that things should or should not be a certain way, and/or that the way things were fair or unfair. Byron Katie’s book Loving What Is and her process known as The Work helped shed much-needed light on that fact that reality is. I don’t like saying, “it is the way it is,” since it has a tinge of resignation to it. Rather, I prefer active acceptance that it simply IS. As Byron Katie states: "When I argue with reality, I lose - but only 100% of the time." This doesn’t mean we don’t strive for a better world or life or self – it just means that we do so from the understanding and clarity that life IS. Remember, too, that justice is different from fairness. For me, what seems to be a simple linguistic change completely reframed my mindset.
I still struggle with the victim’s mindset, and probably always will to a degree. I am not at all negating the mental struggle that depression and anxiety present: It is real, it is significant, and it absolutely feeds my victim mindset. You cannot simply “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and just snap yourself out of mental illness. You don't have to be suffering with depression and anxiety to struggle with the victim’s mindset, nor are you broken if you do – it is a natural, human response, but not one we need to accept at face value. Shedding the belief systems that are keeping us away from our personal power or dwindling our belief in our wholeness is a lifelong process.
“When I argue with reality, I lose - but only 100% of the time.”