Playing the Victim: Stop Or You won’t Have the Power to Live Your Best Life Now Pt 2

If you haven’t read the first blog, check it out here. So what is the trump card?

The “Trump card”

For those who are unfamiliar with this term, think about the card game Spades. (If you’re unfamiliar, click here for a brief overview.) According to 24/7 Spades’ website, “Spades is a game of trumps, where all spades are the best cards in the game and will beat all other suits.”

For those who have made their victimhood a badge of honor, they use their story to trump or beat everybody else’s.

• If you had it bad, they had it worse.
• If you experienced a trauma and were able to overcome, it’s only because you didn’t experience trauma as badly as they did.
• If their life has turned out negatively, they definitely have no part, responsibility, fault, or blame in it.
• Their life is horrible because of trauma, neglect, abuse, their parent’s divorce, the death of their family member, being given up for adoption, their partner breaking up with or leaving them, sexism, racism, ageism, classism, prejudice, discrimination*…

If you ever want to live a truly purposeful, meaningful, and happy life, you must kick the victimhood mentality to the curb. Getting into the habit of constantly thinking, “If X hadn’t been done to me, I would be on top of the world” is unhelpful in the grand scheme of things. You can’t go back in time. What’s done is done.

Chronically rehashing all of the things that went wrong in your life will only serve to re-traumatize and re-victimize you.

Keep this up and you will become a prisoner to your own mentality, doomed to repeat the same old faulty patterns that have never helped you. Or in laymen’s terms, “If you get on the “victimhood train,” you will eventually end up at “nowhere station”.

The VIP uses their victimhood as the ultimate explanation for why they have not reached, and continue to not achieve, their complete potential.

And in cases where they are at fault they accept:

NO blame

NO responsibility

Accordingly, because they use victimhood as their main defense mechanism their life is characterized by:

NO insight

NO growth

NO maturity

NO awareness

NO self-actualization

NO real progress made

So while the perpetual victim may not be aware of it at first, their reliance on victimhood ultimately leads them NOwhere.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Each of the factors mentioned above can definitely negatively impact the trajectory of your life. It can make your life painful, and in some cases, feel unbearable.

Remember, while you may not always be able to change or completely eradicate these factors, you ultimately get to decide which perspective you will take. Will these issues be an insurmountable obstacle in your path? Or will they be a speed bump or detour that slows you down but doesn’t keep you from getting to your ultimate destination?

We can’t always change what happened to us. However, we can learn to change how we respond from here on out.

Have you been using victimhood as your trump card? What would need to change to help you get out of this habit?

*Side note: While I mentioned several “isms” above, I want to make it crystal clear that I am not referring to the genuine systematic factors that negatively affect one’s life. If there is one thing the past few years have shown us it’s that there there are several structures in place that systematically keep certain groups of people down in various ways. In this short blog post I can’t even begin to adequately address these issues and what would need to change overall to bring about positive improvements. For example, I am very much aware that the average woman makes significantly less than her male counterpart. And for women of color, this wage gap is even wider. While this is something that needs to change (and I encourage everyone out there to try to bring about meaningful change in this area), this isn’t something that I (or you) can change overnight. Instead, this particular post is geared towards focusing on what can be changed immediately: our mindset and/or negative thought patterns that stand in the way of our success.