TEN WAYS TO TRANSCEND VICTIM MENTALITY
By: Lyon Brave
Tags: Mental Health, Victim Shaming, Mental Health Awareness, Abuse, Healing From Trauma

TRANSCENDING THE VICTIM MENTALITY

To transform the victim mentality first we must understand what victim mentality is. Being a victim and suffering from victim mentality are two different situations. Being at a party drunk, then taken upstairs and taken advantage of after you passed out makes you a victim. Leaving your property in a public space and then having it stolen makes you a victim. Identity theft is on the rise, and someone stealing your personal information and maxing out your credit cards makes you a victim. Getting into a car accident because the other driver ran a red light makes you a victim. With that being said, there is a saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”.

If we continue to get hammered at parties, and wake up the next day declaring someone raped us again, we are functioning from a victim mentality because we are not learning from our mistakes and we continue to position ourselves in a state of weakness. If our stuff continues to get stolen, we are not being mindful enough to keep our private property out of public spaces. We are not learning from life’s lessons and life will keep teaching us until we finally get it.

Most of the time life is just trying to get you to stand up for yourself. In order to not to be a victim, you have to be courageous enough to fight for yourself when nobody else cares. The difference between being a victim and victim mentality is the world can turn the strongest of us into victims, but it is the weakest of us who cannot move past tragedy and forever remain traumatized in victim mentality.

The world is going to hurt us all.

Someone with a victim mentality, will only look to the hurt and the scar. Someone with a strong mentality, will look forward to healing and see the scar as badge of strength. They will see themselves as fighters who won. They will probably say things like, “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” and when they tell their tale of being victimized, they will probably make it sound triumphant instead of as misfortunate event that crushed them for all eternity and they had no chance to ever recover. If you are alive there is always a chance to recover and not just survive, but thrive in spite the traumas you experienced in life.

If you are suffering from a victim mentality you will make yourself out to be a loser. You will see the unfortunate events you experienced in the darkest light possible. You will see the bad even that happened to you as the end of your life. You probably say things like, “I have a miserable life. I was destined to be destroyed by the world,” and the most popular thing people with victim mentalities say, “I want to kill myself”. If you have a victim mentality, you put the worse spin on things. Instead of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel all you see is darkness.

If you do not suffer from victim mentality, you understand when life goes to shit, there is an opportunity to be made tougher and wiser from the tragedy. Tragedy isn’t a good thing, but it’s not a bad thing either. This world is about balances, opposites, yin and yang, light and dark, male and female, yes and no. Opposites is how the world achieves equilibrium. There is a lot to be learned from tragedy, like how to emphasize with other people’s struggles. Tragedy can teach you how strong you are or weak. It can teach you about the madness of other humans and the heroic natures of humans as well. Being in a tragic situation is perhaps the fastest way to learn what kind of person you are. Grow from your tragedies. Don’t let them destroy you.

Most tragedy isn’t personal. It’s random and it’s better not to take the misfortunes of life too seriously. You should never beat yourself up because life beat you up, but this is what a person with a victim mentality will do. They will blame themselves and say they deserved it and they deserve more bad things to come and expect them to come. Having victim mentality can form after being in abusive relationships for years and years. This mentality often forms after being the escape goat in a toxic family or after experiencing a series of bad luck and events.

Still what defines you isn’t what happens to you because a happening is temporary. All things come to pass. What defines you is how you think about the events that occurred because how you think directly influences your actions and the life you will lead.

If you were abducted, you can hide in the shadows for the rest of your life, and most people will understand this and leave you be, or you can take self-defense classes and become a force to be reckoned with and live a fearless life because you survived the worse and are ready to kick ass and take names if anyone ever tries to harm you again. You can use the pain to strengthen yourself or you can use the pain as a reason to become weaker and weaker, until you are overcome with grief and too afraid to ever step foot outside again.

You cannot let fear control your life. I don’t care if someone shot you and stole your laptop. Because you survived, you have to go on living. Because you survived, you should have more gratitude towards your life than ever before. Don’t let the demons inside and wreak havoc on your mind. Don’t let your attacker keep controlling your life years later.

The battle you have to fight is not external, like when the attack first happened. The battle you are fighting is internal. No that you get away from your abuser, the person who pointed a gun at you, the person who broke your ribs with a bat, the trick is to let it go and this requires more than avoiding them in physical reality. This requires avoiding them in mental reality. Not letting them in to destroy your mind and heart is where the real battle takes place.

When thoughts of them come into your head you have to push them out and not be drawn back into the event. No matter how much blood and screaming there was, no matter how many people died that day, you have to stop relieving it in your head. Replaying the scene, over and over again, will turn your life into a nightmare.

I don’t know why there was a bomb on the subway that day. I don’t know why you held your brother why he died from a stroke. I don’t know why the driver, didn’t see your little girl in the street. I don’t know why your mom’s friend raped you, I don’t know why that kid walked into the school with a gun. I don’t know why you slipped down the stairs and became paralyzed.

I don’t know why. You shouldn’t go through the rest of your life trying to answer this question. You’re not going to find the answers. You’re only going to torment yourself trying to figure out how someone could be so disturbed and cruel, or life unfair. Analyzing the situation to death, will keep you in victim mentality. To completely transform your life, you have to let go of the situation. You have to focus on what is good and new, and leave the past behind, not just in physical location, but in thought. Try not to think of it.

TEN WAYS TO TRANSCEND VICTIM MENTALITY

1 Ask Yourself What Did You Learn: Life works in mysterious ways. Life has lessons to teach us. Learn from your mistakes and master your life lessons.

2 Take A Moment: You do need to let go of the situation at some point, but that doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge it when it first happens. Take a moment, to vent to your friends, to cry, to scream, to mourn. Get it out of your system. You would be a robot if you didn’t.

3 You’re Not Superman: You might need to join a support group, go to therapy, read self-help books. Know when you need to ask for help. Depending on the level of trauma you experienced, you might need a lot of help to recover mentally, and physically, and that doesn’t make you weak because you need help.

4 Surround Yourself With Loved Ones: When you are hurting, it’s nice to be around those who love you, those you trust. Hugs really help.

5 Take Up A Hobby: You always wanted to take salsa dancing, a few weeks after your friend dies, might be the best time to do it, because what it the alternative, getting drunk, having suicidal thoughts, and thinking the world is over because your friend died. Your life is not over. There are other friends to make, so go meet them at dance class and get your mind off your grief.

6 Soothe Yourself: Everyone has their own comforts, whatever yours are do them: paint your nails, suck your thumb, eat tons of comfort food, stay in bed, get a massage, go shopping, listen to music, have your love hold you for a really long time or friend.

7 Write About It: The best way to deal with past trauma is honestly to write about. Even people who are close to us tend to feel uncomfortable when we talk about the gory parts of our life. Sometimes, even if we want to talk about it we can’t because we don’t have a shoulder to lean on. Writing will give you safe place to voice what happened to you. You will also gain insights that you wouldn’t just through thinking or talking about the incident. It’s also a constructive way to channel your grief over getting drunk and trying to start fights with white guys, because it was a whit cop who shot your brother

8 Do Good For Others: If you want to stop feeling sorry for yourself the fastest way to do that is to get out in the world and help other people. Seeing someone who has it worse than you is very sobering to pity parties. Plus, helping other makes you feel good.

9 Find Your Role Models: Whatever happened to you, your situation is not unique. There are amputees, war vets, people with disabilities, burn victims,, breasts that were cut off because of cancer, vaginas that got stitched up because of ignorance, people who got caught in shootings, public bombs, people who got fucked up in car accidents. Whatever happened to you, it happened to someone else too. Your trauma is not unique. The reason that’s important is because whatever you went through, someone else has survived the situation and thrived because of it.

10 Be Strong: You have to be strong. We all do.