90-Day A Better Me Series

Part II: A Journey of Perspective

What Launches Us Forward: The Stable Foundation

Day 41: Letting Go of Our Victim Role

“In any given moment, I might be wounded, but I can choose not to act from my wound.”

-Marianne Williamson

There is a difference between being a victim and taking on the victim role. Being the victim isn’t a choice, the victim role is. This doesn’t mean we aren’t going to have all kinds of feelings about what happened. We have to allow ourselves to feel through the pain, grief, confusion, sadness, and losses. We change when we experience trauma, it can be a gift or a prison—the choice is ours. We make the choice from minute to minute. We have the opportunity to learn from every choice we make. Our awareness is what keeps us learning and growing. Even living with P.T.S.D. it is possible leave the victim role behind. When we actively work to let go of the victim role, our episodes lessen and become less frequent. By releasing the story, we can process P.T.S.D. episodes and learn from them. We stop learning when we numb, avoid, and ignore our feelings. Childhood trauma can affect the development of neural pathways.  This can cause multiple psychological issues. The victim role is a story we tell ourselves over and over and it affects our choices, relationships, how we learn, and how we react to people, places, things, and events. Living in the victim role is a choice we make to live in the dark. We resist the light, we fight ideas that come from it and we stay in the chaos caused by the darkness.

Side note: Trauma therapy has showed amazing results for helping the affects of trauma whether it is in a child or adult. It is important to feel through the feelings and find our personal triggers so we can identify them when they come up. Our awareness of how the trauma affects our thinking and processing can help us to move past the traumatic experience and re-wire our thinking to assist us in the recovery process. 

If we were the victim of a natural disaster or an unhealthy individual, and we don’t want to take on the victim role: First, we have to accept the reality of what happened. We can’t ignore, deny, numb, placate, or excuse it.  Next, we have to give ourselves time and space to process the feelings. When we process our feelings, we can choose to stop contributing to the energy that keeps us in that moment in the traumatic event. It happened, that is a fact.  We felt victimized which is completely understandable. Finally, we have to take responsibility for any of the dark energy we have contributed to the process. We aren’t taking responsibility for anything that physically happened to us, we are taking responsibility for our feelings, thoughts, actions, and reactions that feed our own darkness. We are responsible for shining light on our own darkness. We can choose not to live life as a victim and many people who have survived trauma have and do make this choice daily. What you do is up to you! NO ONE can keep you a victim except for you!

If we experienced traumatic effects from a natural disaster, we can pick something else to focus on besides the loss. We can focus on the support of friends, family, neighbors, countries, and good Samaritans from all over the globe. We can focus on the heroes and the people who showed compassion and love to strangers. We can focus on learning about our priorities, because natural disasters definitely put them into place for us. Doing these things keeps us from getting trapped in the story of the victim. We accept what happened, take responsibility for any of the toxic energy we contributed to the situation, and learn the lessons of the heart.

If a sick individual(s) victimized us whether it is from a terrorist attack, abuse, rape, verbal attack, public shaming, etc. We can focus on our strength, courage, perseverance, faith, positive self-worth, the people who support us and show up for us. We can focus on the messages from people who have not only survived attacks but allowed them to play an essential role in helping others. The people who didn’t let others take them down can inspire us—If we let them. These are just a few different perspectives. We get to choose! We are not powerless over our feelings, thoughts, actions, and reactions. When we realize that we start attracting more of what we want in our lives instead of what we don’t want. We are not given a life sentence of being a victim.

If we experienced abuse, neglect, or abandonment as a child, we can choose to learn from our experiences and find the blessings in the knowledge we gained. We learn that self-worth has to come from the inside. We learn that we can’t depend on anyone else to make us feel worthy and loved, we have to find that within ourselves. We can learn the definition of love and start living life from there. We don’t have to live according to someone else’s unhealthy life choices; we can study and learn about ones that feel better to us. We can find communities of people who understand the importance of empowering ourselves to make better choices than the people we were raised by. We can look at the people who made the unhealthy choices with compassion as we learn that only sick and wounded people letting the darkness lead them are capable of hurting someone like they did. We may see they have a disease or illness that keeps them from being able to feel love in an authentic way. We become open to seeing that there is actual brain damage that can cause people to be this ill. We can become healthy enough to not repeat the patterns that we were immersed in during our early years. We can see that we have a choice in how we feel, think, act, and react. We can choose to live better.

Some of the great inspirational leaders came experienced trauma and at were one time or other victimized. They chose not to accept the role as a victim. They became empowered by the lessons they learned and found perspectives that helped them grow into the person of strength, courage, perseverance, hope, and faith that guided them into the light from the dark. They didn’t agree to stay in the dark corner that many people unknowingly support victims being in. They dug themselves out of the dirt, felt their way through the pain, and transformed into to the butterflies they knew they were. We get to see people everyday make choices to soar over the chaos. They choose to live in the light. If we want to choose to live in the light, we need to follow and/or walk with others who help light the way. I call them Earth Angels.

Earth Angels are the people who choose to live life from a loving place even in the toughest of times. They are the friends who show up, the strangers who step up, and the leaders who speak up shining their light from within and allowing us to be apart of it. They are the answers to our prayers. They are messengers of our Divine Creator showing us examples of how to project our own lights. They give us seeds and we need to choose whether to plant them, put them in our pocket for later, or throw them away. How we live reflects what we chose to do with the seeds. In this day and age we can see these Earth Angels EVERYWHERE! There are stories of them all over the world. You can recognize them when you notice your own light, because if you spot it, you got it. We can only see what we already have inside. Light recognizes light; dark recognizes dark.

If we want a path out of the victim role, we have to first be aware of it, which is why the 90-Day A Better Me Series is in three parts. If we are stuck in cycles of fear, blaming, shaming, judging, and hating others (Part I), we are in the victim role. When we are operating as our best selves, we don’t feel the need to take down others.

People living in the victim role keep chaos alive because it’s comfortable. There is something familiar about it, so if they aren’t in chaos, they create it themselves and attract individuals that will keep them in positions they can feel victim of. Once again, this is not about judgment, it is the Law of Attraction. If we tell ourselves we are victims, we attract circumstances to be victim of. We can turn people trying to good things for us into a reason to be victim, instead of seeing that they were acting out of love. Believe me, I have been here and it is not pretty. It’s our perception that needs fixing, what happens around us won’t change for the better until we change. When we release ourselves from the victim role, we begin to see clearly.

Letting go of our victim role is us empowering ourselves to make choices that we couldn’t even see when we lived within that role. The victim role is a box we put ourselves in. Letting go is us knocking down those walls and setting us free to live differently. There is never one way to think of things. We have a million different perspectives to choose from. Letting go of any role we are attached to opens us up to see perspectives (Part II) that will serve our lives in a healthier way. This coming week we are going to dive deep into The Smooth Edges of Perspective (Day 42), Perspectives of Truth (Day 43), Accepting Perspectives in Our World (Day 44), Releasing Perspectives that Don’t Serve Us (Day 45), and Finding Perspectives to Serve Our Personal Truth (Day 46). Are you ready to transform your thinking and beliefs to work for you?

Just for Today

Look in the mirror; is the person looking back at you stuck in the victim role? If she/he is the victim of your emotional abuse, she/he is stuck in the victim role. It all beginnings and ends with the person in the mirror. Tell yourself you are ready to let go of the victim role and find new perspectives of thought. Become aware of anytime you make yourself the victim of someone else’s or your own choices, actions, words, and/or lives. Actively choose another way to look at the situation. How can you look at it without being the victim? How can you take responsibility for your feelings, thoughts, actions, and reactions? What can you choose to do differently in this moment?

With Love and Gratitude,

Rachael Wolff  ©2019

Don’t forget to check out today’s Letter from A Better Me 90-Day A Better Me Letters Series: Day 41 – Letting Go of My Inner Victim