How Some People Ruin Their Own Lives
By: Kathy
July 7, 2013

Are you unknowingly ruining your life with victim thinking?  A victim is someone who is on the receiving end of some kind of mistreatment.  We all have this to a certain degree, but where do you stand?  If you don’t recognize this in yourself, it may be causing a lot of misery in your life!

Let me start by saying, that if your life feels completely miserable, this is probably you, so please try to hear this!  Your life won’t change until you understand this concept!  A  victim is someone who has no control over their life.  They are frequently disappointed over the way someone has treated them.  People don’t love them enough!  People don’t spend enough time with them!  People don’t treat them they way they want to be treated!  Any pain the victim feels can be tied to something someone did, or didn’t do.  Sometimes they are like a severe burn victim – literally everything hurts!   Anytime the wind blows and the victim feels slighted, they sink into themselves and review  their growing list of slights  and become miserable.  No one could “love” them enough to pull them out of that place!

At first, being a victim is alluring.  When I’m a victim, nothing is my fault!  Who wouldn’t want that??  If I feel pain and it is someone else’s fault, then I can spend my time nursing my pain and don’t have to experience the pain of  examining myself.  People feel sorry for me when I’m in pain, so I get a lot of attention!   So there is some benefit in being a victim, but that is the extent of it and it is very short lived!  You may not be ‘at fault’, but you’re still hurting!

After the victim cycle of woe has taken off, we become dependent on everyone else for our happiness.  Our loved ones feed into that process and we do feel genuinely happy – as long as they are feeding us a steady diet of what we need.  Eventually that becomes exhausting, however, and there will be a slight.  The victim pounces on it.  The other person backs up a little.  The victim goes into deep despair over a seemingly small offense.  While at first, the people around the victim will try to help them up out of that place, eventually, they catch on. . . nothing is good enough to satisfy!  It doesn’t seem like the victim really wants out of their misery.  They always nestle back into their victim seat, content to lash out at everyone for slighting them while all the while feeling miserable.  Eventually the thing they feared the most has come true . . . people don’t want to be around them at all.

Sadly, what is really happening is that a victim trades out the long term love they want for the short term satisfaction of being able to blame everyone else for their pain.

When you know what it is and you see it in someone else, it is like watching a train wreck.  They cannot see how they are making themselves miserable with their victim thinking.  It can be fixed, however!  If you see victim thinking in your own life, get to work on it today before it grows into a life of misery!  You CAN have a wonderful life, but it will not be accomplished by getting everyone else around you to act differently.  Get with a counselor today to see where the seeds of victim thinking might be planted in your life.  The freedom to love and be loved to the fullest extent awaits . . .