Why forgiving someone else is about you

I think the letting go part they mention is important but letting go can be done in a different way. When you reframe the story, add a new chapter, one where the last battle you lost, but the new one you win. Holding onto toxic feelings is painful, you can either turn it into a good one (revenge), forgive (reframe), or forget (drug use and/or time). Most people forget unless it was really bad.

even in this woke era those legal systems can hardly be called civilised though. i mean the punishment for rape is being wed to the victim. also the "forgiveness" there is bought using wealth, kind of like out of court settlement but even for criminal matters not just civil.

> Pretending that other people cant affect you and cant harm you is just nonsense.

Yes, that's right. Which is why I mentioned thinking about "others as having more power over you than they do" and acknowledged upthread that "There are situations where you're disempowered, taken advantage of, or abused."

I think you're hearing me say something like "no one is victimized." Far from it. People really are victimized, and they are victims in those situations.

But the question is whether, over time, they continue to engage with the world primarily as victims or whether their victimization is an event that's placed in the past.

I mentioned being cheated on. I do not believe that "maybe cheating was my fault or maybe I remember it wrong." I remember it very well, and I am absolutely confident that my ex's decisions and actions were hers and hers alone. I also spent a fair amount of time in pain.

Now, I could go forward in the world continuing to feel that pain. I could go forward in the world thinking things like "I won't ever be in a healthy, trusting relationship" or "next time, I need to have more control over my partner" or "it must be that I'm an inadequate man."

But I don't. Was I a victim? Yes. Do I have that victim mindset? No.

I was bullied as a child. Well into adulthood, I held on to a number of victim-oriented views, such as: people probably don't like me; other men are threats; I can't be friends with men. That's the bullshit. This painful series of events happened to me when I was young, but I took lessons about how children treated me and overgeneralized from them.

Can people still affect me and harm me? Yes, of course! But I don't need to go around looking over my shoulder and expecting that from everyone. I can remove myself from situations; I can fight back; I can call out the harmful behavior. I'm not in the victim mindset of "other people are hurting me and there's nothing I can do." I'm in the empowered mindset of "other people might hurt me, but there are things I can do about that."

Along with that, I've realized that some people won't like me, but that's up to them, and others do like me. And that some men are threats, but others are kind, and I can choose which men I associate with.

Like I said earlier, no one is denying victimhood. But it's a victim mindset to generalize painful and disempowering experiences, and make those the primary lens in your mental view of the world.

If someone has told you to shut up about uncomfortable things to hear that have happened to you, I'm sorry. That's wrong. In fact, changing your worldview generally requires digging into those things that have happened to you. But a lot of people take and advocate the unhealthy approach of "just suck it up" or telling someone to "stop playing the victim" without recognizing the hard and somewhat lengthy journey it can take to actually develop and reinforce a healthier more empowered worldview.

> I held on to a number of victim-oriented views, such as: people probably don't like me; other men are threats; I can't be friends with men. That's the bullshit. This painful series of events happened to me when I was young, but I took lessons about how children treated me and overgeneralized from them.

None of that is "victim oriented". It seems to me that you are seriously invested into making the word "victim" into something bad.

The mindset you describe is "victim mindset" only because you want that word to mean something bad. You do project everything bad you possibly can into it. I mean, yeah, fear and over-correction are all withing range of normal initial reactions to disempowering situation. Just like they are perfectly normal reaction to getting into car crash.

Then again, other people do get themselves into same situations again and again because they just cant admit to themselves that they are victims in those situations. Which is less likely to happen with car crash.

But only in one case people do work hard to stigmatize the descriptor word. When you are afraid of cars after car crash, people do generally recommend you therapy, but they wont be like "victim mindset you are bad one it is all supposed to be always under your control".

This isn't something I'm just making up. You can read the Wikipedia article[0] about it, as a starting point, or dig further into transactional analysis or the Karpman drama triangle.[1]

I don't want to turn "victim" into mean something bad—rather, as you've made pains to point out, victims have legitimately bad things happen to them, and that's... bad.

Holding onto that pain in the long run is bad, too. It's not about the "initial reaction"—of course fear and anger and whatnot happens! It's about whether one reifies and adopts those initial reactions as a worldview, or whether one places the event in context, learns the appropriate lessons, and moves forward.

I mean, do you think the following views of the world are good and healthy for people to hold?

- that their lives are a series of challenges directly aimed at them;

- that most aspects of life are negative and beyond their control;

- that because of the challenges in their lives, they deserve sympathy;

- that as they have little power to change things, little action should be taken to improve their problems.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_mentality

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle