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Psychologist Valery Gut told how to stop being a victim in a relationship
01.05.2023 20:21
None of us is immune from other people's attempts to harm us or assert themselves at our expense.
Valery Gut, PhD in Psychology and developer of the theory of adaptive intelligence, told how to stop being a victim in a relationship.
We may encounter violence in relationships, bullying in a team, toxic friendships, etc.
Some people deal with such situations calmly, while others become victims of inappropriate behavior.
The difference lies in the basic psychological settings that either make us submit to circumstances or serve as reliable protection. The good news is that these settings can be adjusted.
Why Victim Is a Role
American psychiatrist Stephen Karpman, who studied patterns of human relationships, determined that people with psychological problems in communication play one of three roles: tyrant, victim, or savior.
The tyrant seeks power and oppresses others, the victim is a helpless, insecure individual, and the rescuer depends on feeling needed.
This behavior is not an inherent character trait. Depending on the circumstances, we can all become rude, submit to fate, or rush to help even if we are not asked. However, a person usually accepts one of the roles as the main one and acts in accordance with it.
Why do we become victims?
There are several reasons why we adopt the role of victim.
- The example of parents. With their behavior they showed that to endure and suffer is normal, correct and even noble.
- Harsh parenting. Control, criticism, and violence teach a child to adapt to others and ignore their own needs and desires.
- Permissive parenting. When indulged and overprotected, a child grows up irresponsible and dependent.
American psychologist Martin Seligman described this behavior with the term “learned helplessness” - a person is unable to take even the simplest actions to improve his life, because he is sure in advance that it is useless. - Imposed values. In society, sacrifice is often perceived as a benefactor and is romanticized. In addition, it is customary to help, care for and protect the victim, which can be very tempting for psychologically weak people.
- Relationships with an abuser. They form a hormonal dependence on "emotional swings" that is very difficult to get out of.
- The benefits of being a victim. Oddly enough, even suffering has its benefits. Being a victim allows you to take responsibility for everything that happens in your life, blame people or circumstances for your failures, and expect more attention, help, and support than people who are able to take care of themselves receive.
What harm does the role of a victim do?
By adopting the role of a victim, we give responsibility for everything that happens to us to other people or circumstances. We constantly tell ourselves how painful, bad and scared we are, instead of encouraging ourselves and looking for a way out.
American psychologist Edith Eva Eger managed to survive the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. One day, she was thrown onto a pile of corpses with a broken back, mistaken for dead.
If Edith had started to feel sorry for herself and go over all her sorrows in her mind, she would not have received help. She survived only because she refused to admit that she was a victim.
Here's what she wrote in her memoir, The Choice: "Our thoughts and beliefs not only determine what we feel, what we do, and what we are capable of, but they often limit us in what we feel, what we do, and what we can do."
How to stop being a victim
To get out of the state of victimhood, you must first acknowledge the fact of your own victimhood.
You have to come to terms with the idea that there will always be abusers, toxic people in the world – all those who assert themselves at the expense of others. They have their own reasons for being like that, their own emotional wounds that make them aggressive and cruel.
Therefore, you need to learn not to remake the people around you, but to notice your desire to feel sorry for yourself, to suffer, or even to be proud: “My suffering is the best!” It is much more correct to ask the question: “What can I do so that I don’t have to endure?”
Taking responsibility for your life, for your reactions, into your own hands is the key point.
It is necessary to understand the reasons that push us to behave like a victim in a given situation, and to realize that we can choose how to behave and how to react.
The lack of internal support makes us weak, insecure and vulnerable. That is why it is so important to be able to understand the reasons for our actions, to understand our true needs, to respect principles, to realize desires.
The more developed and strong our personality becomes, the more firmly we build our internal supports, the fewer people there are around us who are capable of harming us.
A technique that allows you to identify your gaps
You need to take a piece of paper and write down ten people who have offended us and even tortured us in life.
Next, opposite each name, write the answer to the question: “Why did he behave this way with me?” You don’t need to limit yourself to judgments like: “Because he’s a bad person.” The task is to understand the reasons that pushed the offender to such behavior, and your own reasons that made you endure pain.
As a result, we gain an understanding of our own weaknesses that require work and strengthening, and we learn to better understand the motives and actions of people and the consequences of communicating with them.
To stop being a victim, we need to notice our abnormal selfless behavior and recognize that we have the right and opportunity to act differently.
By working on yourself, understand the preconditions that formed the psychology of a victim and get rid of them.
When we learn to understand the motives of other people, grow our inner support, take responsibility for our lives into our own hands, we will become truly adults and gain the opportunity to build the future according to our taste and discretion.
