TRANSCRIPT
What is the difference between having a victim mentality and not having a victim mentality? There’s a pithy little statement that a friend of mine and I came up with that highlights this difference: it’s “they broke it, you fix it.” Meaning, my parents or some other person abused me, victimized me, and it’s my job as an adult to heal it.
When people haven’t figured out that it’s their responsibility, that it’s ultimately only their responsibility to heal their problems, to fix their problems, to take the helm of their healing process, at some level they’re still going to be expecting that someone out there can, or even more so should, do it for them. Such that in some way, they still remain a child in their mentality, thinking that it is the adult’s responsibility, the parent’s responsibility, to take care of them, to fix them, to heal them, to make up for what happened to them.
When people become adults, when they’re no longer children, that doesn’t work anymore. Sometimes they can manipulate relationships such that they get people to try to take care of them. They get people to place themselves in the role of savior, a fixer, a helper, and they can present themselves to the world as helpless, powerless, just like the victim that they once were.
And that’s where it’s complicated. Because when people have a victim mentality, often really what they are doing is very loudly, or sometimes subtly, showing the world exactly what happened to them. They’re giving the world clues, and sometimes very loud clues, about how victimized they actually were, how powerless they were rendered in their childhoods, how they were traumatized, how helpless they were, and how they didn’t know what to do, how they didn’t know how to heal themselves.
The problem is, when you go through life that way as an adult, it’s very problematic. For starters, it excuses the basic fundamental, most wonderful thing about being an adult, and that’s that we can be a parent for ourselves. We can, and we ultimately have to be the primary guide in our own lives to figure out how to grow and how to heal.
What I’ve seen is that people who have a victim mentality—and this is one of the saddest things about it—as much as they can talk about all the terrible things that happened to them, talk about all the ways in which they were abused and traumatized and harmed by life, often very accurately talk about it, they’re not growing. They’re not healing from what happened to them. They’re not changing. Often, they are wallowing in it, ruminating over it, and underneath it, often maybe even ubiquitously all the time, at some level, there is a big core of self-pity in or underlying this victim mentality. The idea that they feel sorry for themselves, and they’re holding other people responsible, not just for what happened to them, but for making up for it.
And that doesn’t work because that directly goes against what it means to be an adult. I’ve even had people accuse me of that: “Oh, you’re being a victim. You have a victim mentality.” And it’s very interesting because often what I’ve seen is the world at large doesn’t know the difference between having a victim mentality and actually healing from being a victim.
One of the main reasons the world doesn’t know the difference—the world at large, the far majority of humanity—is that the world at large is so shut down. They’re blocking what happened to them. They’re trying to push away their childhoods, the memories of the bad things that happened to them, the negative sides of their parents, the negative sides of the other power figures in their childhood. They don’t want to remember it, but most importantly, they don’t want to feel it because it’s so painful. It’s absolutely painful to bring up what happened.
And so what they do is they take anyone they view—anyone often who is talking about it, who’s recalling what happened—for instance, me talking about, “Yes, my parents did A, B, and C,” and how horrible it was and how it affected me. They’re not necessarily in any way looking at what is the person doing with this? What is the person doing with these memories, this information? Is this person transforming? Just the fact of calling out one’s victimizers in any way is enough for so many people to say that is having a victim mentality, whereas really they’re not seeing that very big dividing line between being an adult in one’s healing process, which does really require talking about, remembering, feeling all the feelings, remembering the scenarios about one’s history of having been a victim, of being abused, of really calling out either in person or just in one’s own mind one’s victimizers and saying that that was wrong, to be able to reclaim one’s feelings.
This highlights something very interesting about the far majority of people from what I’ve seen. The norm, actually, in a covert way, they often do have a victim mentality. They’re just not aware of it. They’re not talking about it, but often they’re going through life doing the exact same thing that people who have a more loud, outspoken victim mentality have.
What they’re doing—the norm is doing—is they’re going through life looking for external salvation. They’re looking for people to rescue them, situations to rescue them. Some examples of this are people who are looking for external rescue from their romantic partners. That’s so common. They’re looking for their partner to save them, to be their other half—the other half being the side that they’ve blocked off. People often look to their children to rescue them, to make them feel good. People look for addictions to rescue them and make them feel good.
This is part and parcel of a victim mentality. It’s not being an adult in one’s life. It’s not healing. It’s not growing, but it’s looking for salvation and rescue in other external things: drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex work—all these different areas that people are looking for some kind of external rescue, some external parent figure that is going to make them feel good.
And then there’s another thing: there are a lot of people in the world who love taking the position of trying to be the salvation figure for the person who has the victim mentality. A lot of people play right into it. They love to be the one who pities the person with the victim mentality. They, in a way, become like a lock and key for the person with the victim mentality. They try to save them. They try to be the parent figure. I see a lot of therapists who do this. They actually like coddling people who have a victim mentality, and the people who have the victim mentality often like to be coddled in return.
It’s a mutually delusional relationship where the person who has the victim mentality isn’t growing and healing, and the person who is coddling them and is playing the savior role isn’t actually helping them to grow at all. But they both get a sort of bizarre false self-esteem from this relationship.
Often what I’ve seen is people with a victim mentality can feel like they’re growing. They can think that they’re growing. They can delude themselves into thinking that this is a good thing. A lot of times they do get attention for their behavior—the kind of attention that they once wished they had gotten when they were a kid. They get people to listen to them when they talk about the bad things that happened to them. But all the listening that they get and the kind of people that they attract to pay attention to them, well, it doesn’t help them grow.
Another thing that I have seen with people who have a victim mentality is that not infrequently behind their desire or even expectation that others should rescue them, that others should be the parent for them, is a lot of rage. If people do not take this position, if people do not jump into the position of being the power figure who is trying to save them, sometimes the worst thing from the position of someone with a victim mentality is if somebody else says, “I don’t want to do that. You are pitying yourself. You have to take responsibility for yourself.” In a way, calling them out on their victim mentality can absolutely infuriate someone who has a victim mentality. It can also terrify them because often the person with the victim mentality believes they can’t do it, or maybe their whole identity is centered around the fact that they’re unable to help themselves.
Calling them out, they can take all their buried rage and frustration and fury at their historical victimizers and displace it onto the person who’s calling them out for their victim mentality behavior. This, of course, can be incredibly confusing and frustrating and terrifying even for someone who calls them out on it, which is a big part of why it is pretty risky to call someone out on their behavior of being a victim, as it were, in society.
So that’s the main thing. The main way that I ultimately divide having a victim mentality versus growing is that the people who have the victim mentality aren’t growing. They’re not healing from their traumas. They’re not becoming integrated. They’re not moving forward in their lives. They’re not becoming parental figures for themselves. They’re not taking control of their healing process. They’re not taking responsibility.
And the people on the other side, the people who really are acknowledging what happened to them, not forgetting, not forgiving so quickly, but instead integrating, grieving, becoming more aware of their traumas, growing, and eventually over time, not being victims anymore.