Befriending the Victim Inside of You

Looking back over the months of recovery from my spine surgery, I see that one of the most challenging states of mind that would show up was an angry, tormented victim. It came when I called my doctor for help with the intense nerve pain and, when I heard back from his staff five days later, they didn’t address my request. It also came when they finally wrote a prescription for pain meds but didn’t send the right form, so it took two more days to get the prescription filled. It showed up too when I was on my way to an appointment and had a flat tire. Then, the man who put the tire back on tightened the lug nuts too much, causing hundreds of dollars of repair, which they are not taking responsibility for.

Oftentimes in the middle of the night when pain would wake me up, for a few minutes my mind was filled with an angry, tormented victim. It would say, “This is not fair!  It is too much! I feel trapped and it is never going to end!” To fall into this mind state is not only painful but it is often accompanied by a judgmental part of our minds, which says something like, “Stop whining and being such a sissy.” These two parts only bring reaction, contraction and eventually despair.

We all experience being a victim. If you doubt that, think of the last time you had a cold or the flu. For most of us, it is something that is happening to you and you are suffering.  In this identification with being a victim, the mind gets frustrated, cantankerous and can feel sorry for itself. This is the victim mentality that our conditioned mind is so very familiar with. If you watch carefully, you’ll see that the victim state tightens you. Remember a time where it was hard to catch a breath, or you woke up with a crick in your neck or your jaw just aches. There is a very good chance that the victim mentality had come for a visit.

We also all experience being an angry victim. Just think of a time where you were told your coworkers were talking about you behind your back, or you’re caught in the impossible gridlock of rush-hour traffic while on your way to an important appointment, or somebody put you on hold for an interminably long time and then the phone disconnected. The sad thing about the angry victim is that it oftentimes feels very righteous and loves to make others wrong, even to the point of revenge. This is clearly seen in the mindset of terrorists and white supremacists. Great violence comes out of experiencing themselves as victims.

And finally, we all have times in our life when we experience the angry, tormented victim. It happens when the big challenges show up, as they do for all of us.  These are the challenges like an unexpected illness, an assault, a deep loss in such as the death of a loved one or our home ripped apart in a storm, or an unexpected, meanspirited rejection from somebody we trusted. At times, the angry, tormented victim can be so intense that we feel we want to die.

Whatever level of the victim you experience, there are two very important things to notice about this state of mind. The first is that when you fall into it, you truly suffer. Victimhood contracts you into the tight and small prison of your mind, making you feel so alone.  The second is it completely locks you out of your own heart. When you are truly hurting and need your heart the most, victimhood has not even a drop of compassion.

So, how do you avoid being so seduced into the victim? The first is to acknowledge that it shows up inside of you a lot. It is very important not to judge this. Just like you absorbed whatever language your family spoke you also absorbed the victim mentality. The second thing you can do is to get to know this state of mind and reading this blog is a good step. Becoming familiar with your victim is about observing when it shows up inside of you.  This gives you the opportunity to get to know it so that it becomes easier to unhook from its story.

It can also be skillful to give the victim inside of you a name.  It is important that it is not a mean name (if you look closely, you’ll see we have been trained to hate victim mentality even though we live in it a lot of the time!).  Allow it to be a kind name for the victim has been hurting all alone inside of you for a very long time. Naming it allows you to step outside of its world for a moment or two and relate to it rather than being lost in it.

The second thing you can do is simply place your hand over your heart when you notice your victim is here. This invites you to bring kindness to the victim inside of you and the more you bring it kindness, the more it calms down.  Then the hidden locks in your heart can spring open and you can flood yourself with the healing balm of your own compassion and kindness. This is what happened for me, over and over again as I woke up into the angry, tormented victim.  Very quickly I would realize that the only thing that was happening was that my mind was scared.  In that realization, my heart opened, and the victim calmed down.

The more you can relate to the victim rather than from it, a very wonderful thing begins to happen. it becomes clear that life isn’t happening to you. No matter what is happening, you realize that life is happening for you and more and more you relax into the intelligent and creative flow of your life.  Or, as beloved teacher Byron Katie once said, “Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it… it’s just easier if you do.”

The invitation that is being offered here is to embrace your victim so that you can know and live from a deep trust of life.