HOW THE VICTIM IN US WORKS AGAINST HEALING

If you ever thought of having suffered a relational trauma, particularly in your childhood, entertaining the thought of having been a victim of abuse, or ignorant behaviour, would have come along with it. While feeling like a victim is a natural response to trauma even during the first stages of one's realisation that we have suffered trauma, feeling like a victim can also have a significant negative impact on the healing process itself. 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 from it.

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. And it can hinder healing because it keeps us stuck in passive states, unable to take proactive steps towards recovery, unable to see new opportunities for feeling powerful and empowered, and unable to be in the world in a manner that could never have been possible during the abuse. The victim perpetually rejects their hero Self, constantly allowing their experiences of abuse to dominate every feeling of freedom and happiness they may have 

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 becomes a coping mechanism: "If it's not there in the front of my awareness, then it's not there at all". This happens because our emotional brains don't really know the difference between what is "real" and imaginary. So if we don't allow ourselves to recall the events in our imaginations, then we can feel as if these events never happened. 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.

Negative Self-Image: Identifying as a victim contributes to a negative self-image. People who feel shame, guilt, or worthlessness, will also find it difficult to talk, share, and seek help about the origin of their shame, and sense of worthlessness. In their paper, Orbach, Lamb and other authors, show how experiences of family violence affect memory retrieval, skewing us towards talking about general events more often than those who have not experienced abuse, even when pressured to give more details. This mechanism begins early in life, with children that have been victims of family violence and suffer from depression being found to be frequently unable to speak about specific events. Identifying as a victim contributes to this vicious cycle of inward avoidance and isolation, and an image of self that cannot move past surface level notions of good and bad. The victim keeps us unable to really speak of who we are, and while that may avoid us the pain of remembering experiences of abuse, it also means avoiding to speak about the power and resilience we have.

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 and resilience to navigate future challenges effectively because they cannot see, today, how they can change their circumstances and the habitual behaviours that they have developed as a reaction to trauma. This leads to the victim feeling in a place of Stagnation, preventing them from finding meaning and purpose beyond the trauma.

Stagnation in turn mutates into 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 sometimes also engage in a very unhealthy, exaggerated, feeding of their trauma memories. Victims of trauma or abuse may constantly ruminate on their experiences, replaying them in their minds over and over whether willing or unwillingly. This rumination can maintain and intensify negative emotions and intrusive thoughts, making it difficult to move forward, often times affecting sleep patterns, concentration levels, the ability to plan, and the ability to relate to others compassionately.  This use of one's brain intelligence keeps the focus narrow and produces a short-term sense of safety, but like in the case of avoidance, it is also a feeding mechanism for the sense of powerlessness we were talking about, and blindness about everything else that was not involved in the trauma itself.

Isolation: Feeling like a victim will often lead to social isolation. People withdraw from friends and family believing that no one can understand or help them or because the sense of worthlessness and negative self-image they carry makes them wish for a world that is "unburdened" from their pain, shame, and even potential anger and blame. These desires to rid the world of our burden can even be at the origin of our suicidal ideation, planning, and suicidal attempts. Isolation at any rate exacerbate feelings of loneliness and depression, impinging even further on our negative self-image. 

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. When we are feeling like a victim we also feel like the world is out there to punish and hurt us, so dependence on others may feel like an appropriate response when early experiences of life have taught us that we had no real power over external circumstances. But an overreliance on external sources of validation or comfort can hinder personal growth and dampen the recognition of one's own unique strengths and independence. Like a terminally ill or handicapped patient, the victim is stripped of  self-care responsibilities. The graver version of this pathway is unhealthy intimate co-dependency, one of the best relational predictors of domestic violence. 

Healing involves confronting and processing the difficult emotions we felt subjected to, and for which we undoubtedly felt to be a victim of in those instances and circumstances. 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. 

If you have been a victim of abuse or developmental trauma, or you are in a relationship with someone who has, watch out how patterns of victimhood play out in either yourself or those who you love.

Look after your heart,

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