Hi everyone! I want to thank you for liking this page and joining in in what I want to see happen for the rest of humanity - to overcome their sense of victimization and start being happy!!
There have been many atrocities committed in this world and many people are suffering as a result. May we all heal and find peace. ❤️
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Victims personalize others' behaviour. Yes, there's a lesson on this in the book.
Here's an example of what I would do when I personalized someone's behaviour or comment: I would think about what they'd done or what they'd said. I would make assumptions, which we're also very good at. I would take offense. I didn't give people the benefit of the doubt because to do that, I wouldn't be acting from my role - living from my own false sense of who I was and how I was supposed to live out my life. I never had any doubt - everyone was out to harm me! Being a victim of two people's strange abusive regime left me convinced everyone else was just as bad. They're not. I could only see past all of this personalizing when I kept the focus on myself. I was a big one for trying to understand other people's motivations without ever asking them; like I said, I made assumptions. I had to keep the focus on myself. In doing this, I became introspective instead of focused on others and making assumptions about what they meant. This was the key to my freedom! I had to admit a lot of things about myself I didn't like. Like the fact that I was present in all the dysfunctional relationships I'd had. The victim always sees themself as above others and a victim of others' negative behaviour and there is the attitude of martyrdom thrown in there to boot. One problem with the victim is that they ALLOW others to mistreat them. They often mistreat themselves though. I remember that I thought that that was my right, if I wanted to abuse myself I could. But others didn't have the right to do that to me, only me. Often when you're abusing yourself, you're abusing others, if not in physicality, then in your thinking. And I had every name for every person who had ever abused me. I was abusing them all with my thoughts. So I was just as bad - I just didn't generally do it physically, although there were times when I did lash out at others. That's why forgiveness is important: it clears up the energy between you and your abusers. Some people abuse as a form of retaliation - I was one of them. Some people abuse because they're energy vampires and think it makes them look superior. It doesn't. When I was a kid, everything I wanted and needed was too much, over the top, not gonna happen, are you asking again, what do YOU want NOW! Ach ja! Everything was an imposition. I heard that taunt, "Gimme gimme never get!" so many times. Where my brother, who was the one who was to continue on the family name, was given more of what he wanted. I don't recall him ever being denied, whereas I was, however this may be my selective thinking, so I can't back that up as fact. Don't think your mind doesn't see things a particular way, to back up this whole syndrome, because it does. The victim mindset loves to fuel its own fire so stick with what you know to be absolutely true.
There is also a syndrome called, "Second daughter syndrome," and I fit there as well. I was the second girl, the second disappointment in my patriarchal, authoritarian parents' minds. Victims are made to feel selfish. Why? Because for starters, the people who are supposed to be your caregivers aren't up for the role, in fact in my case, it was a role reversal where I took care of their emotional needs. I was conditioned to spend hours listening to my mother's complaining, where my father certainly wasn't going to, because for starters, he was who she was complaining about. What's more, I can't really remember my parents even speaking to each other that much - they tended to triangulate through us kids! In true victim style, my mother married a perpetrator and a man who couldn't meet her needs. So she used her kids to fulfill that role. Clearly, she had nothing to give us. So I took this out into my adult life. Victims will do a lot for others but nothing for themselves because they learned self neglect. They do so much for others because they want their approval - "You're so nice! Look at all you do for me!" but in fact this usually works to get them further abused. I have worked through a lot of this. Just going to Tim Horton's and buying a coffee and a donut I felt horrible guilt and realized it was my inner mother voice telling me that I was being too extravagant. Spending so much on myself, shame on me when you could make a cup of coffee at home for a fraction of the price! I went to the art gallery north of Toronto, had to pay to park which started the voice up right there, but then looked at and appreciated artwork I knew my parents would not approve of! This was Group of Seven and they were abstract artists! They said abstract artwork is nonsense. My father was a brilliant watercolourist - really a master - but he painted in the realistic style so of course I learned nothing else was good enough, and spending that day in the art gallery was a real challenge for me but I did it. However, I had to deal with "The Voice" the whole time! You just have to fly in the face of the inner voice that tells you you're wrong, shame on you, and how dare you do something your parents wouldn't approve of. Abuse victims have to deal with stuff like this. You have to stop giving in to it! I was raised with parents who had very strict absolutes. There were no shades of grey. You complied with their opinions and what they wanted or suffer the shame. Every child internalizes the voices of their parents as a way of learning to be an adult themself; that's one reason so many people act like their parents. But the victim has to fight the voices and win over their program of control, manipulation and shaming or spend their life suffering! The upside is this gives a person a brilliant opportunity to be authentically themself, not a carbon copy of their same sex parent (for heterosexuals, for homosexuals, the opposite). You create lack in your life, not abundance, because you think asking anything of life is not to be granted to you, and you feel ashamed, guilty and selfish for even asking! You don't want to be seen as "bad" any more than you already do. So you deny yourself. This is called martyrdom. Leave martyrdom to the saints, and overcome the voice inside that tells you you're greedy, selfish, and not worth the money you're spending on yourself. You also tend to label others as "greedy" because to you who constantly denies yourself, someone who tries to meet all their material needs looks greedy. This is you projecting onto other people because you would love to be so "greedy" as well. You have projected the part of you that wants to have everything you want and need but are denying yourself. Always watch when you judge another because often this is a key to rebalancing and self reintegration. Underearning is also another thing learned by victims and it has to do with the same thing - the shame of wanting too much. You have to have less than others because it stops the voice from harassing you. In order to ensure you have less than others, you pick out people who drive more expensive cars and justify this to yourself. "See, they have a better car than I do, so I"m not asking too much of life." All of this has to dispensed with. Faced, and overcome. It doesn't serve you and it doesn't serve the world to see you shrinking back. Everyone has a gift to give this world and victimhood has to be overcome in order to figure out what it is. In my case, my gift was overcoming it to help others do the same. Elizabeth Kubler Ross has documented the process of grieving losses. This is the process that those who have suffered abuse go through. They are going through a process of loss. What I lost was myself and my ability to love myself and others. I became completely defensive and kept attacking myself as way of trying to prepare for any scenario I might have to face. My motto was, "You should've known better!" and I was on myself every time I took another attack from others.
The five stages are described below, and you can go back and forth. It's not a straight trip through them. I got stuck in Anger for a long time. If you'd looked in the dictionary for a definition of anger, you would have seen my picture. It started when I was a teenager. I could erupt and scream like a banshee with no warning, with a flood of energy rising up through me like a bolt of lightning! I was never proud of my temper but when I showed it, people backed off. I found it handy after a while that I could intimidate people by using this anger, so that may have been part of the reason I used it: to protect the part of me that felt like a victim. What I realized later was that was what my father had been doing as well, when he had attacked me as a child - defending himself! I was fragmented, that's for sure. I even asked my therapist if I had Dissociative Identity Disorder and he replied, "No, but you sure are split!" You never knew which part of me you were dealing with and which part would show up at a moment's notice. I saw myself as being defensive, and the others as having deserved these attacks. So the victim can also be someone else's perpetator. When you're stuck in anger, you're liable to switch triangle positions very readily. I was like that. I now realize that nobody deserves to be attacked, including myself. I don't practice it anymore and I won't allow others to do it to me. People don't attack others unless they're hurting; that's important to remember and that helps in forgiving them and yourself. Forgiving yourself and others for being imperfect is important. I found the entire process of healing I went through was a process of forgiving. Asking yourself to forgive someone who is still abusing you is pretty hard to do. Asking yourself to forgive when you're raw with pain is also near impossible. Working at it as a goal is a day to day process but it's worth it because you can release the anger and start to live normally again. The last stage of this recovery is acceptance and there is peace in that. The Five Stages of Grief DENIAL Denial is the first of the five stages of grief. It helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle. As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you are unknowingly beginning the healing process. You are becoming stronger, and the denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying begin to surface. ANGER Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is God in this? Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural to feel deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t attend the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – – your anger toward them. The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love. BARGAINING Before a loss, it seems like you will do anything if only your loved one would be spared. “Please God, ” you bargain, “I will never be angry at my wife again if you’ll just let her live.” After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest of my life to helping others. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?” We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one. DEPRESSION After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness, wondering, perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of. The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If grief is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way. ACCEPTANCE Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. Most people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. We will never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves. Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time. Be sure when you choose a therapist that they fulfill this one requirement. It's absolutely essential to your recovery. Make sure they're not a perpetator type!
If they're aggressive, untrustworthy, shifty in any way, condemning of you, shaming, guilting... do not see that therapist! Stop immediately. I was so fortunate to have a therapist who was the salt of the earth! This man listened patiently while I told him the same things over and over again and he behaved as if it was a new story I was telling him. I had to keep saying it to release the energy I had pent up around the event. He responded by being a good witness but by expecting me to do my work as well. I had another therapist once who tried to make a point with me by standing up and taking off his belt. I stopped seeing him because he had breeched my boundaries and any professional boundary, and I lost any trust in him that I had. It's important that you can trust them. So important. Anyone inclined to violate you in any way is not trustworthy. Ruminating is like you're complaining to yourself. Grousing is another word for it. Or grumbling.
Whatever happens, the victim is sure that this is for the sake of sticking it to them another time. This starts the victim cycle again, over and over when you think like that. That has to be stopped. Life isn't sticking it to you. We just happen to live in a world where there is a lot of miscommunication, people who want to take advantage and much lies and b.s. The difference is YOU. You are the difference between believing life sucks and believing you have the confidence to handle all of this stuff, the confidence to make short work of these problems and getting back to what you really enjoy doing. I get irritated because I find these things take me away from my plans for the day - having to deal with others' errors or even deliberate infractions of my free will, however that IS my path. And it's there to help me gain more confidence in myself. Nothing you experience is a fluke. It's all there to help you towards self mastery. My irritation is my resistance to learning that there is a lesson in self-empowerment there for me and it's best to deal with it without getting into a flap. I'm currently dealing with a manipulative landlord and just found out that on goodreads my books have been accredited to another author! So I have to deal with these things and doing them assertively and with little complaint makes it easier for me - because my COMPLAINING and my ATTITUDE are what's making it harder! Yes. When you have a better attitude towards life's problems, fixing them goes much more smoothly. So what are we ruminating about then? The fact that something has come up, or the fear that your attitude will make it harder for you? You're the crux of all of this. Your attitude gets you through smoothly or not. Your choice. As for ruminating, you'll stop when you realize that problems are nothing to fear. They're just challenges in disguise and they're there to help you grow. I've been showing my apartment for my landlord because he has only a part time super to do it. I think trusting the tenants not to spill the beans on why they're moving is like playing with fire, but he's that dysfunctional that he'd do that.
So I said I'd do it for the greater good. However the problem with the greater good is that on this planet there are advantage takers - the "give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile" club. I could see my landlord, if the apartment isn't rented, asking me to continue to go over there and show it. But that's where I"m drawing the line - I'll show it as long as I"m in it. When I move it won't be inconvenient to show it but the fact is I'll be sitting there waiting for people like I am now. Even that is difficult for someone with no memory to speak of. The other reason is it's not my job to do that. I could see this becoming a real habit for him to ask because he is manipulative, very manipulative and manipulative people have boundary issues. Well, I don't. I have to ask myself how interested am I in becoming involved with someone who's that manipulative (the answer is I'm not) and getting involved in his business (I'm not) also doing for him what he should be doing for himself (I'm not). This is a business and if he wants to make the money, I figure he should do the work. I'll be rethinking this to see if I'm running afoul of universal law on this and I'll see where I come up. Clear boundaries make sure you don't get taken advantage of. The question is "How much are you willing to do for someone else?" We have boundaries 3 ways: 1. the way we allow others to treat us, 2. the way we allow ourselves to treat others, and 3. internalized boundaries - the way we conduct ourselves.
I can see that this move next door is starting to become complicated. The landlord wants me to stay where I am, he wants the super to show the apartment but the super wants me to do it (????), the landlord and the super also have some issues with each other. I have to decide: How involved am I going to be in this? Am I going to get involved in the landlord and super's argument (no), am I going to get the super involved in my stuff with the landlord? (no), am I going to take the prospect's side or am I going to try to get the place rented (that's an ethical issue but I feel I should help the landlord). This whole thing is heating up and I have to see how involved I"m going to be in it. And I'm not. I'm just doing what I need to for myself and staying out of the rest of it. Unless it's a child or a disabled child or adult, you're not responsible for them.
It's up to you whether you want to help - to help them with their problems or to help them otherwise, but it's for you to decide what service you're going to be to others. It's not up to them to decide for you - this is an infringement on your free will to be self determining. You're not here to fix others, especially when you're suffering from this problem of victimhood yourself. Fix yourself first, then you can decide more clearly who you'll deal with and in what capacity. Going back and forth with my landlord about moving to the apartment next door.
He's having trouble finding a renter for my apartment, most likely because of the time of year. Here is where you have to be clear: what is your problem and what is not your problem. My problem is the noise and the smell of cigarettes that I have to endure in this place. When the windows are closed in the winter, such as now, it absolutely stinks. It is NOT MY PROBLEM that my landlord can't find a renter. He's going to lose money. That's too bad. He's lost a lot of money on apartments that people have trashed before they moved out, like the one I'm moving into. A completely refurbished apartment with only one smoker in the next apartment. Nobody above me. You have to be CLEAR about what's your responsibility and what isn't. He's trying to get me to wait until the guy who's in the other apartment DIES so I can move in there. Buddy, I'll have left Cornwall long before that point. Does he think that I'm so beholden to this place after having to threaten to sue the upstairs neighbours to be quiet at night? I sensed his anxiety the other day when talking to him about this. It makes him anxious. Other people's emotions ARE NOT YOUR PROBLEM. How they choose to react is their problem. Now he says he's going to only rent to quiet tenants. Yes, like the ones in the apartment I will move into - get high on meth and smash holes in the doors. Maybe the next ones will do it quietly. I'll just fog him from now on if he keeps it up. I'm not keen on going back and forth on text messages either. This is power. You let others experience the consequences of their own choices. I see a better opportunity for myself and he's trying to manipulate me out of it. You stand your ground. The only way to stay SANE in an INSANE world is to have boundaries that respect yourself. You can compromise with people at times if you feel you want to, but in this case I want that apartment. My eyes are burning from the ciggy smoke in here so I'm outta here. Don't assume that people are out to make you happy. They're out to make themselves happy, especially when it comes to things like business transactions which is what this is. That's the other thing I learned about landlords and landladies a while ago: don't make friends with them. When you cross over boundaries from "business boundaries" to "friend boundaries" they will play your friendship against their need to have you rent or stay where you are or move, whatever they want. A tenant playing friend boundaries with the landlord can screw them out of rent because they're great friends. I've been very upfront with my landlord. I've told him he rents to the transient community of this city and they are all alcohol and drug addicted. I implied I need to protect myself from his poor choices. He reaps what he sows. That's universal law. If he makes poor choices then his tenants won't believe a word he says and that's where we're at right now. Stick up for yourself. Compromise at times but understand when it's not good to do so. The fact that my landlord is bullshitting me indicates one of those times now. I believe he's hiding something from me, either the fact that the time of year is bad or this apartment is hard to rent for some reason. Either way, it's his problem, not mine. |
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