If you are a victim you are entitled to treat your victimizer with contempt and, increasingly, violence. It removes your victimizer from then normal moral calculus. All the better if the victimizer can be made a general category, and as amorphous and abstract as possible, thereby allowing your manipulator to direct your anger at whoever they choose from that category. Note that this does not necessarily mean that you…
Why People Feel Like Victims
211–220 of 510 posts
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#212As someone who was abducted and kidnapped at gun point, PTSD and trauma are experienced differently by different people. PTSD/trauma may be the result of being victimized, but it is not “learned” any more than a bone might “learn” to break under stress. What happens under extreme trauma is an onslaught of electric signals and chemical reactions in the brain, essentially adrenaline (fight or flight) and cortisol (stre…
I'm not saying there's no overlap between the two categories but it's an important distinction nonetheless.
Another way of talking about it is most people have been victimized by some trauma or another but how they respond to that, whether they see themselves as a victim and adopt that mindset, whether they see themselves as survivor, a thriver, whether they remake the meaning of that trauma and the response to it into some meaning that's personal for them and that is useful for them, is ultimately within the power of that individual. Some people go through stages some people choose for that trauma to define a large part of how they see themselves.
Life has suffering and trauma and I think it's important for a person to make some ways they can personally deal with that. At the same time I think life is so much more than suffering and trauma and it's important to keep that in mind as well.
Ultimately what you make of life, what you make it mean, it is up to you. I don't want to say it's not easy, or it's not hard, because everyone's different. but one thing I personally found useful is in dealing with the, as you mentioned, condition neural responses of traumatic memories is: where I live you can obtain the compound inderol (propranolol) over the counter and if you do self hypnotic regression when you go back and you know experience that memory again but you do it under the influence of inderol what happens is that the emotional intensity of those memories as you reactivate them becomes lessened. This does at least two things one is that the next time you remember them they're not as painful. The second is that by lessening the emotional intensity you're able to face an experience the emotions, and the associated events themselves, perhaps more fully and perhaps more objectively. I think it helps give you more perspective which is helpful.
While I found that effective I actually feel other strategies for emotional processing were more effective for me, strategies that, different to the first one, involved directly feeling facing and processing the thoughts and emotions of myself and other participants in those memories.
So whatever you do is your responsibility and I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just sharing some personal experience. Still, it's possible and understandable though that you may take what I'm saying at some sort of advice even though I don't intend it like, so even I don't want to say this because I know it's your responsibility what you choose to do, I think the way our society works in order for me to protect myself I better say the following: if you're thinking of trying what I told you I tried then I think you should talk with your doctor first about what I told you. While this technique is similar to the currently experimented MDMA regression therapies, there's also plenty of other ways to do emotional processing, but that may be one method you might find assists with some of the neurological aspects of it.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#213> So victimhood is a learned behavior after a certain age. As a brown guy with kids in the school system, that's why recent trends in education alarm me. I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. It's dangerous experimentation with kids' psychology. Growing up as one…
Same thing but I have girls. I don't want them growing up with the locus of control outside of themselves. The studies are convincing that that is the worst thing you can for a child.
The serenity prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. When I was young, victimhood was mostly scorned. "Don't be a crybaby." "Shake it off." "Toughen up." "Words can't hurt you." These were the messages I got from parents and teachers when I was feeling sorry for myself.
That seems to be an orthogonal issue. Namely, the expectation that whatever wrong you have suffered should be righted. The message is to shut up because nobody is going to help you. Certainly effective to getting the victim to stop complaining. But that's not the same as actually coping with the issue, or better yet, solving it.
Which is why our problems now are so much bigger, since our complaining became so much louder.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can debate all day long about the merits of explaining systemic racism to young black kids vs keeping them ignorant about it. However the people ignoring the facts are the ones who deny systemic racism exists. It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background.
> We can debate all day long about the merits of explaining systemic racism to young black kids vs keeping them ignorant about it. However the people ignoring the facts are the ones who deny systemic racism exists. Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. Not only that, it deliberately repurposes a label that ordinarily refers to prejudi…
Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian). Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.
Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.
And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean really. Do you really think that if someone who's unsuccessful because of laziness that if only they hadn't heard about systemic racism they would have a better work ethic? The laziness comes first. The excuse is crafted after the fact. If it wasnt that they'd claim to have some other disadvantage or problem.
A lot of psychotherapy is convincing individuals that they are in control of their actions and can decide how they react to and influence their environment. A lot of what we're teaching now is the opposite. It's like anti-CBT. Teach everyone they are helpless against the nefarious powers that be.
At the same time there is systemic unfairness both in the legacy of racism that has created inequality and in how society operates to this very day and I don't know how you solve those problems if you don't address them. The status quo is not acceptable to myself or a lot of other people
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#217As someone who was abducted and kidnapped at gun point, PTSD and trauma are experienced differently by different people. PTSD/trauma may be the result of being victimized, but it is not “learned” any more than a bone might “learn” to break under stress. What happens under extreme trauma is an onslaught of electric signals and chemical reactions in the brain, essentially adrenaline (fight or flight) and cortisol (stre…
> but it is involuntary No and yes. PTSD/trauma is the result of resistance to being. A person resists having their awareness in their body and being there with their emotions during crisis, and instead they are 'in shock' for the duration. This allows confusion or the kind of mental blocks where there is no recollection to happen. Once confusion or mental blocks manifest, it can be quite the challenge to regain clar…
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#218Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Teaching that words can't do you permanent harm, yes. How you feel when being called a name, or having someone say something hurtful may not be a choice. But whether you dwell on it, whether you choose to continue to feel hurt, whether you choose to act in revenge... all of those things are within one's control. We absolutely should teach self-control and mastery of one's emotions to children. It helps them become sa…
Why is it so much the problem of the person being targeted though? The approach you describe seems not to address the behavior of the aggressors at all.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ridiculous position I'm well aware of how other people perceive it. It's completely contrary to the barrage of what I call "cult of the victim" that spews forth from nearly all media. I don't expect to change your mind. But give it a chance. For example, A man falls down the stairs and breaks his leg. Victim: "I'm so unlucky, my leg broke. Oh, life is so unfair." Non-Victim: "Phew, I'm so lucky! I could have broken…
Listen I’m glad this approach seems to work to you and I hope it might even get you through some dark times one day, but there is a reason you are using contrived child like examples here, it’s because it doesn’t hold up to anything remotely dark. What life lessons do you want for the parent of a child who was sexually abused for example? Are they allowed to feel like a victim? What about the child?