Published by Bob on 01 Apr 2008 at 05:00 am
Self Victimization
I have a confession to make. I’ve blamed my childhood for issues I didn’t want to take responsibility for as an adult… Sound Familiar?
In my search for the cause of certain quirks, which I attributed to “just being my personality”, I was able to point (with help from the Intentional Prosperity™ System) to specific childhood experiences which I was the victim of.
Aha! It was something that happened to me at a point in my life when I was least able to protect myself from it’s effects. Hey, when you’re young, you don’t have a lot of experience and wisdom to handle those constant trial and error experiences. You get affected. I mean, that’s what childhood is about. Finding out what works and what doesn’t work. It’s a time of life when everything affects you.
The challenge, once you “discover” the source of your quirk: Do you use it as an excuse or do you fix it and move-on?
Believe it or not there’s a growing number of people who actually embrace victimization as a valid excuse for their continuing problematic life experience. As a victim they are not responsible for their actions now, as adults. Okay, I even bought into that one for a while. Call it my misplaced sympathy which bordered on enabling bad behavior. Then one day I woke up to a simple yet profound realization:
The trajectory of my life has resulted in a number of experiences which constantly tested the boundaries of what I thought I knew… what I actually believed… and what I wanted to believe. These experiences have been continuous since I was a child. As I got older I had a greater amount of experience I could rely upon as a means of sorting out the “ultimate” meaning. You would think this would give me a much greater overview and capacity to deal with the challenges of day-to-day life.
Not true.
The betrayal and victimization of a childhood incident continued to influence and flavor how I was reacting to things. I was unconsciously reinforcing my own victimization… punishing myself again and again as if I was reliving the childhood experience.
Wait a minute! I’m doing this to myself?
I was refusing to take responsibility for my own life. Because now, as an adult, I had the power to forgive myself, forgive others and dissipate the lingering emotional ghost of a (long forgotten, recently remembered) childhood incident. My refusal to view my childhood experience from my adult perspective had two unintended consequences:
1. I was chaining myself to a point in time where I was victimized by an emotional reaction based on inexperience.
2. I compounded the emotional damage by still blaming that poor kid’s experience for issues I was refusing to take responsibility for now as an adult. Which means I was blaming my inner child!
The victim mentality blames the child inside and continues to punish the child because the adult refuses to take responsibility for changing the perspective of the memory. Yes, changing the perspective. As an adult with years of experience and wisdom we can finally let our child out of emotional prison. We have the power to pardon the prison sentence.
Of course, doing so requires you to take responsibility for how you feel, think and act. You must have the courage to look back in time and see your life as a set of experiences.
It’s a detached way of looking at your life which enables you to become more connected to your true self.
Chris Cade on 01 Apr 2008 at 9:55 am #
I couldn’t agree more with your post — there are so many times in my life I’ve used the “But that’s the way I am” and “Well, it’s because so-and-so hurt me before” excuses.
This is a great time for some financial advice though. How many investments say, “Past performance is not an indicator of future performance”? That’s because when it comes to money, they know that the past is the past, the future is uncertain, and the present is the only time when the money actually has value.
Same with our experience, our memories, our beliefs… when people really embody the reality that all of these things only exist *now* (it’s not like we can walk into our past, grab an apple we didn’t finish and re-eat it or anything), then we start to become empowered to live *now* and use the past as an understanding for the present rather than an excuse.
Much easier said than done. Every day I still have challenges in this regard, but being aware is the first step towards moving to a place of being in the present and not believing that our past is who we are today.
I didn’t think of this until just now as I was writing this, but I find it ironic that if we hurt somebody else, then in the future we often look back and say “Well, I’m not that same person anymore,” yet if somebody else hurt us in the past we often look back and say, “Well, it happened before so it’ll probably happen again.”
Food for thought…
Bob on 02 Apr 2008 at 1:49 pm #
Chris,
Interesting points…
Memory fades overtime and the details of a specific situation often become lost. The emotional energy (feeling) does not and resonates as a part of our day-to-day consciousness. This serves to “color” how we balance our inner and outer reality and how we filter our ongoing perception of reality.
I maintain that forgiveness is the most powerful thing you can do for yourself… “Well, I’m not the same person anymore” from a perspective of self-forgiveness is a good thing. However, “well, it happened before so it’ll probably happen again” has its roots in an individual’s attitudes, opinions and beliefs. No amount of forgiveness is going to dissipate the expectation of a negative forgone conclusion. I believe you get exactly what you expect out of life. Discovering what you expect (what you really believe) and recognizing you have the power and freedom to modify those expectations is the “prime directive” of the human experience.
-Bob Baran