HOW DOES FEELING LIKE A VICTIM AFFECT THERAPY?

If you ever thought of having suffered a relational trauma, particularly in your childhood, entertaining the thought of having been a victim of abuse would have come along with it. Let's have a look at some of the ways in which identifying with the position of being a victim can have negative repercussions on our healing.

Powerlessness

The first shadow side to the victim position is that victims are powerless. Having been a victim of abuse must have entailed someone overpowering us, and therefore us having felt powerless, but when we identify strongly as a victim, we often continue to feel powerless and helpless in return. To overcome this sense of powerlessness, the victim identified person or part of us needs to engage with activities that seem somewhat scary, or even terrifying. This may range from eating something uncommon, to jumping off a high place (where many others do so safely please!), to engaging in dancing that feels uncomfortable or talk to a boy or girl that we fear rejection from. The key to break powerlessness, is to engage with our power to face our fears, rather than our tendencies to avoid them.

Avoidance

Victims of trauma, any trauma, most often avoid facing their feelings and memories because these same feelings are the carrier of a bunch of other associated negative experiences, such as feeling powerless, feeling deeply alone, feeling scared or terrified in the world, feeling sad for having been betrayed, feeling angry for the injustice, and so on. Avoidance, however, is a neurologically self-reinforcing mechanism, that can not only prevent us from processing and working through that which keeps us from living truly, but also become the source of physical illnesses. To break avoidance, we must confront that which we fear.

Negative Self-Image

Identifying as a victim contributes to a negative self-image. The victim keeps us unable to really speak of who we are in positive and powerful ways, inciting us to build a social network that often repeats the saviour-victim-perpetrator triangle. Once our social or intimate relationships circle around our identities as a victim, our capacity to express authenticity diminishes even further.  To remedy this position, the victim-identified person, or part of ourselves, needs to surround him or herself with people who seem to be capable of neutral or quasi-objective opinions, and engage in activities that he or she loves.

Lack of Resilience

 An important aspect of healing from trauma is developing resilience, but without a core sense of being a unique and uniquely standing individual there can be no resilience. If someone perceives themselves solely as a victim, they may not develop the necessary coping skills to change their circumstances and the habitual behaviors that they have developed as a reaction to trauma. This position as a victim also tends to encourage others to continue to behave in the way that the first abuser/s did. Our position as a victim incites the bullying, the abuse, the offense, the taking advantage of. To begin building resilience we must therefore confront the behaviours that keep us from confronting with courage the abuser, oppressor, offender.

Stagnation and Rumination

If it is true that a victim can keep their memories out of mind and out of sight, it is also true that victims can engage in a very unhealthy feeding of their trauma memories, replaying in their minds over and over the abuse. This rumination can maintain and intensify negative emotions and intrusive thoughts, often times affecting sleep patterns, concentration levels, the ability to plan, and the ability to relate to others compassionately. The best way to move forward and away from rumination is to learn how to meditate or to become involved in activities that we thoroughly love. 

Isolation

Feeling like a victim will often lead to social isolation. Victims withdraw from friends and family believing that no one can understand or help them. It also makes them wish for a world that is "unburdened" from their pain, a desire at the origin of suicidal ideation, planning, and suicidal attempts. To break the isolation one needs to overcome the attachment one has built to the sadness and sense of being a victim. One needs to tap into one's capacity to be brave, open, and honest about one's vulnerability, without confusing this with the tendency to back down when threatened.

Dependence on Others

If a victim identified person can often seek avoidance and withdrawal as a coping mechanism, they can also develop an unhealthy reliance on others to make them feel better about their perceived powerlessness. Like a terminally ill or handicapped patient, the victim is stripped of self-care responsibilities, a pathway that often leads to co-dependency, one of the best relational predictors of domestic violence. To break away from co-dependency is one of the hardests things to do, because here the relationship to one's own identity of victimism is reinforced by the needs of the partner to maintain the victim in the victim status. For this reason, breaking out of the habit of co-dependency can only come, as a healthy movement out, in the form of both partners wanting to change and move out of the victim-saviour, or victim-perpetrator triangulation.

Healing involves confronting and processing the difficult emotions we felt subjected to. But what was an adaptive initial response, becomes the hook that holds our sense of powerlessness, isolation, negative-self-image, lack of resilience and stagnation, a set of inner core beliefs that are prone to either change us into new perpetrators, or victims who cyclically re-experience, in all sorts of relationships, the original trauma.

Look after your Heart,

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