Taken from The Star Newspaper - Weekender, Saturday, 30 January 2010
If you often feel let down and hard done by, you may be trapped in the victim syndrome. Here's how to rise above it and take control of your life.
You've only to listen to the heartfelt wail of a newborn baby who's impatient for their next fed to realise we're all born with a strong will to survive. But somewhere along the way many of us lose that vital survival instinct and become victims.
It's easy to spot a victim. She's the one who is always in the throes of some disastrous love affair. She's the first to be laid off when redundancies are made. If she goes on holiday, it's always her plane that's delayed.
It's hard not to feel sorry for her. But could it be her own fault? According to psychologists, some of us are especially prone to the victim mentality - perhaps because we're brought up to put ourselves and our needs in second place. Looking after ourselves, a perfectly natural and commendable impulse, may have been condemned as "selfish" by our mothers, who themselves put everyone else's needs before their own. At the same time, the victim mentality has its payoffs.
Putting yourself last, allowing yourself to be walked over and giving more than you get allows you to feel more in control, while making others depend on you increases your feeling of power.
Finding the balance
In relationships, the emotional seesaw between dependence and independence can be kept in the complex balance by the two partners who each refuse to take responsibility for their own needs. For example - the woman who lets her partner take responsibility for everything - from choosing her clothes to deciding what TV channel they are going to watch may find that if she becomes more confident and starts to assert herself, her partner mysteriously dwindles in self-esteem and becomes wretched and unhappy. To restore health to their relationship, both need to give and receive, to support and be supported.
Another feature of the victim mentality is described by psychologists as an "external locus of control" - the rest of us call it "blaming things on other people". When something goes wrong, it's never anything to do with them: it's always their partner, their boss, their friend or some outside circumstance that has conspired against them. They are the innocent victim, and, of course, because whatever has happened is always someone else's fault, there is absolutely nothing the victim can do to put things right.
Carolyn is a typical example. Her friends are constantly on standby for the long, miserable phone calls as she falls for yet another "bastard". Men who have a variety of problems seem to home in on her with the unerring instinct that she will attempt to rescue them. Ironically, by allowing herself to blame them for their disastrous relationships, Carolyn is able to side-step the real problem: her inability to look after her own needs. She wants other people both to rescue her, and she feels angry and hard done by if they don't. At the same time, when they do this, it makes her feel uncomfortable and resentful because it implies she is not in control of her own life.
Key to survival
Survivors, on the other hand - people from all walks of life who have endured difficult and sometimes extreme situations with few, if any, lasting scars - have one quality in common: the ability to regain their emotional equilibrium when things go wrong. This self- righting quality, or resilience, is the essence of their ability to survive. Unlike victims, survivors have what psychologists call an "internal locus of control". They believe that they are responsible for their own feelings and emotions, and are confident that whatever happens to them, they will be able to find a way of dealing with it. In other words, it's not so much what happens to you that counts, as how you think about it and deal with it.
The ability to approach a crisis - whether it's an affair of the heart or losing your job - with an open, confident frame of mind and a portfolio of skills to draw on that fits in with your way of doing things is the key to avoiding the victim syndrome. And psychologists have discovered that we don't develop the ability to bounce back from problems and dealing with them effectively that helps to steel us against emotional knocks, in much the same way as having a dose of an illness helps us resist future bouts of the same infection.
Psychologist Professor Michael Rutter of London's Institute of Psychiatry says, "Resilience results from having the encounter at a time and in a way that the body can cope with successfully." One key aspect of the survivor mentality is the ability to choose how you react to situations, rather than being dominated by rigid ideas and habits. This means being able to be strong yet gentle, trusting yet cautious and to see humour in situations while taking them seriously. It also means having the ability to balance independence with dependency, impulsiveness with organisation and logic with creativity.
The more opposing qualities you can develop, the greater the range of choices you have when Doomsday strikes and the more successfully you will be able to deal with problems.
Measured response
Fortunately, it's possible to strengthen your weaker qualities simply by practising them. For example, if you dislike conflict and always seek out a quiet life, you can learn to be more direct and confrontational, perhaps by attending an assertiveness course or reading a book on the subject. Similarly, if you are normally forceful and competitive, you need to learn to be more yielding and conciliatory by practising listening to people.
Becoming aware of your usual behaviour and consciously trying to modify it will help you develop your emotional repertoire and become more flexible. Remember, it's not simply a question of changing your mind for the sake of it. Never knowing what you are going to feel or do from one day to the next is a waste of time and energy.
But being able to look at each situation and assess how you are going to deal with it will go a long way to prevent you falling into victim mode.
Another secret of being a survivor is to cultivate a full life. If you concentrate on one part of your life to the exclusion of everything else, then it will be hard to avoid feeling victimised should a major upset happen in that area. If, however, you put something into every aspect of your life - work, relationships, children, hobbies, friends, time on you own - you'll have worthwhile activities to counterbalance problems and more sources of the feel-good factor if something goes wrong.
Finally, whenever things go wrong, learn to look for the positive aspects of the experience. For exampls, if you've split up with your partner, think about what you've gained, rather than lost, from the relationship.
Focus on the opportunities the break-up brings you, such as the freedom you now have to do the things that you want, when and how you like. That way, whenever bad things happen, you'll gain another vital attribute that will enable you to escape the victim mentality: the ability to convert disaster into good fortune.
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