A victim is someone who feels powerless, and is therefore unable to take appropriate action to resolve situations adversely affecting their well-being.
Being powerless is learned behaviour originating from repeated childhood experiences where core needs were not met adequately.
From birth and through early childhood children are unable to provide for themselves basic physiological needs, safety needs, the social needs of belonging, love and affection, and the self-esteem needs of personal worth, social recognition and having a satisfying sense of accomplishment.
The victim mentality can be understood as a repetitive way of negative thinking where the victim has come to believe that others, not them, are responsible for their experiences and fulfilling their needs.
This can be taken further to mean that the victim mentality comes from a person getting stuck in a stage of development where they feel helpless lacking access to inner resources to take care of themselves. The victim mentality produces adults that feel entitled and demand being taking care off.
The victim mentality is characterized by an attitude of blaming and complaining. The secret agenda of blaming and complaining is to manipulate and control others to be responsible for you by rationalizations and excuses.
The victim mentality is maintained by unconscious negative self-images, which are the building blocks of your personality.
Everyone constructs a personality that serves the function of an identity. Self-images are put together by the mind as memories of repeated interactions with authority figures: parents, older siblings, grandparents, teachers, religion etc. A self-image always represents an interaction with authority.
This memorized interactions captured what you were told about yourself and more important, how this interactions felt to you. These experiences become core beliefs that once accepted subconsciously function as instructions on how to behave in every situation.
Behaviour is determined unconsciously by survival instincts. There are three main drives biologically wired into the human brain:
1-Avoid harm.
2-Approach rewards.
3-Attach to others and have others attached to you.
People identified with the victim mentality are unable to fulfil their core survival needs on their own. This precarious situation makes them dependent on others to feel safe, feel good and experience belonging and love. Like children, victims get very clever at manipulating others for their own gains. This way of being maintains low self-esteem due to the constant fears that the ones they depend on might reject them or abandoned them.
Releasing the victim identity
In order to think like a victim you must feel like a victim. Your identity at its most fundamental level represents how you feel about yourself. This is why uncovering your negative self-images is so important. The core negative self-image that maintains a loss of power is made up of a constellation of core beliefs that deny your value and cause you to feel unworthy. They can be summarized by the toxic core belief: “I’m not good enoughâ€.
Once you feel powerless it is easy and automatic that you will fear failure and punishment. What you must understand is that you do this to yourself by giving your attention to negative thoughts that produce the familiar negative emotions inside your personality. You do this by unconsciously judging, criticizing and shaming yourself, and usually projecting this to others.
From victim to victor
The first step in transforming the victim mentality is to have enough guts to admit that there are certain areas of your life that you are primarily functioning with an “victim mentality†even if it’s sub conscious!
The second step in transforming the victim mentality is to transform your identity from victim to victor, one who conquers and overcomes defeat. The victim mentality causes you to feel weak and therefore give up and giving in to external pressures.
The third step in transforming the victim mentality…..is to do our workshop! Drop us a mail for more information ockert@icon.co.za