The dictionary defines a victim as “one who suffers from any destructive or adverse situation or agency.” When the destructive or adverse situation or agency exists in the real world, the victimization occurs in reality. However, when the destructive or adverse situation exists primarily or entirely within the sufferer’s mind, the victimization is more imagined than real. It is real to the sufferers and their pain is legitimate and valid, but they are in distress more than is needed. We need to identify the source of this excess suffering so that we can relieve it in the right way. When we do not know what the right way is, we are liable to relieve it in the wrong way, which will only make the suffering worse. It is not our fault that we do not know what the right way is, they do not teach it in our schools.

Millions of children are victimized by their parents, not because the parents are “bad” people but because they feel inadequately prepared to cope with the demanding tasks of parenthood. These children acquire the victim role early in their lives. This childhood role will not end on the individual’s eighteenth birthday. These children carry their perception of themselves as victims into adulthood where it interferes with their relationships at home and at work. It creates problems for them that they do not know how to solve.

It is important to realize that not all children of victimizers come to perceive themselves as victims. An older sister may emerge from childhood perceiving herself as the nurturer of victims, an older son may adapt the role of the super-responsible rescuer of victims, while the baby of the family may learn to use charm to ward off the victimizations that he has learned to expect from life. It may be that the middle child is singled out to receive the brunt of the abuse and becomes the designated victim of the family. This is the child who will carry the victim role into the future.

All of these children were victimized, but the dynamics of the family constellation has prevented them from playing identical roles. Each child has found a unique “solution” to the victim problem. Yet, these children will become impaired adults also. The big sister will not be compatible with healthy men, only with victims who “need” her nurturing. Her children will learn that it doesn’t pay to be healthy. She will pay little attention to healthy children, only those who need her nurturing. The super responsible son will be compatible with irresponsible, inadequate people who need his problem solving capabilities. If they have no problems, he will be out of business. They will see to it that he is kept busy. The baby will be compatible with people who will take care of him forever.

A significant variable here is the creative power of the individual; some children can use their creative power to solve the painful problems that victimization by loved ones can present. Other children become discouraged and stop using their creative power to solve these problems. Creative power, is a function of the child’s self-respect. Children who find ways to hang on to their self-respect will have more creative power available to them for problem solving. Children who take their victimization as an invalidation of their personal worth, and most of them cannot take it any other way, come to hold themselves in contempt. By extension, they come to have contempt for their problem- solving abilities. They resign themselves to a lifetime of playing the role of the “useless,” “worthless” victim.

Some children are victimized by a tragedy that takes away a mother or father suddenly, permanently and without warning. The child may not have been physically injured in the accident, but they will carry the emotional scars of this deprivation into the future. A few “lucky” children do not seem to be victimized at all. Their childhood is ideal. For them, life is pleasant when things go their way. Their friends envy their good fortune and happiness. However, these people are poorly prepared for the ups and downs of life. For them, the other side of the coin is that life is very unpleasant when it doesn’t go their way. They perceive negative events in their lives as unacceptable deviations from the norm, which is not a norm at all, they only believe it is. They take each disappointment of everyday life as if it were victimization. In time, these “advantaged souls”, too, join the ranks of victims waiting for the next victimization to happen. We tell them to “count their blessings,” as if their assets in the present could undo a negative lifestyle perpetuated from childhood.

Bad things happen to all of us, but those of us with self-respect do not perceive them as personal affronts or punishments from God. They can say to themselves, “Tornadoes, floods and earthquakes come and go, but I am not a Victim, I am still me.” However, those individuals who have learned to play the “Victim” role early in life are not so fortunate. They perceive every reversal, major or minor, as if the Fates for a special hell were singling them out. They have carried their Victim role and its component attitudes from childhood into adulthood. They are viewing life through victim-colored glasses.

For instance, victims are predisposed to perceive adverse situations where no adverse situations exist — “How come Angelina Jolie never returns my calls?” “she hates me, I just know it.” or to exacerbate the adversities of everyday life into full-blown catastrophes (“Other people can drive 90 miles an hour on the sidewalk and get away with it. But not me. Oh, no, I get a ticket. Why me?”). Cliff has been getting away with his wrongdoing for years. However, all the other times when he did not get caught for speeding did not offset in any way his underlying conviction that he is a victim this time. When he sees other motorists pulled over to the side of the road and getting a traffic citation, he does not empathize with them as a fellow sufferer. “Serves him right, the jerk.” No one is a victim to Cliff except Cliff. Cliff’s childhood attitudes exist below the level of his conscious awareness, where events in the real world do not affect them. These attitudes were learned emotionally and cannot be unlearned intellectually or experientially in the present. Neither can he “will” these silent attitudes out of existence.

Unself-respecting individuals are more vulnerable to the victim syndrome than their self-respecting cousins. Since unself-respecting people do not have mature identities as human beings, they can only play the roles that they learned as children and never outgrew. Although “victim” is a noun, these people do not experience themselves as living their lives. They are not the subject of the sentence or even of their own life; they do not take initiatives; they do not act. All they can do is react to what is done to them, they are on the receiving end of life. They live their lives in the objective case. They are the object of their own verb, to be; and their being is always negative.

Victims do not live in the indicative mood, in the world as it is. They live in the subjunctive mood, the world of “shoulds” and “as ifs.” They behave “as if” things were true that are not true at all. They even wonder, sometimes, why they have such an uphill battle coping with the world as it is. They attribute their difficulty to the “fact” that they are Victims of Life, which of course they are not. It is their attitudes towards themselves that predispose them to behave as if they were.

These are some of the major components of the residual anger that victims carry with them wherever they go:

1. As previously mentioned, Cliff often perceives victimization when no victimization is intended. He has no feedback system that will tell him that his perceptions are mistaken, so he continues to believe that he is correct. His perceived victimizations make him feel as angry as if they were real ones: “I should have gotten that raise. I’ve been here three days longer than that guy!”

2. Cliff often feels that it does not pay to protest his victimization. It will only lead to further victimization. He suppresses his anger until he can’t stand the pressure.

3. When Cliff does try to protest, he often does it in a self-indulgent, counter-productive manner which only results in a confirmation of his prediction of victimization: “You’re stupid, Boss.” His boss’s negative response compounds the anger that he had in the first place. He does not see how his inappropriate behavior contributes to the “victimization” that he is complaining about.

4. Cliff suppresses his anger without even realizing consciously that he is doing so. As a child, his attitude became, “Why get angry, what good would it do?” He defines “good” as if it meant changing another person’s mind in his favor, and he “knows” that that is hopeless. That is not the “good” that expressing appropriate anger accomplishes, but Cliff has had no experience with competently managed anger. The concept is foreign to his upbringing. On a deeper level, Cliff is “allergic” to doing anything constructive on his own behalf because it would be inconsistent with his role as a victim. When the pressure of his mismanaged anger becomes intolerable, he explodes. The consequence of his mismanaged anger is often another “victimization” and he does not “deserve” that one either.

5. Cliff is sensitive to the unfairness of life, especially as it impacts on him. He suffers from the mistaken conviction that:

(a) life should be fair;

(b) life is fair to others;

(c) life is not fair to him;

(d) that fairness means sameness;

(e) that he is an objective arbiter of these matters.

All this unfairness makes him very angry. He is the victim of unfairness and he cannot understand why he is being singled-out for victimization. “Why me?” He does not “deserve” this abuse because he is a “swell guy” if he says so himself. His present definition of fairness is the same one he had when he was four years old. “Everybody gets the same size present.” That is not fairness, it is sameness. He doesn’t know the difference. He also defines fairness as “getting my way.” When he doesn’t get his way, it is not fair. According to his self-serving definition, bad employees like himself should get the same consideration as good employees. His boss does not share his definition. When they argue, they are not on the same wavelength, but neither one knows why.

6. Allergic To Cooperation – Cliff tends to confuse requests for cooperation with demands for submission. These “demands” make him angry. When he refuses to “submit to his boss’ invitation to cooperate as an equal,” he sets himself up for the disaster that he has predicted for himself.

7. Control is very important to Cliff. He is a controller. Unfortunately, he does not know what control really is nor how to get it. He can only control in negative, destructive ways. Cliff defines control as “preventing bad things from happening.” His built in scenario has several components:
a) “I predict that I will be victimized in the future as I have been in the past.”
b) “This prediction is scary and painful. It is my responsibility to relieve this pain in any way I can.”
c) “If I can prevent the victimization from happening, I won’t get hurt.”
d) “I will try to prevent bad things from happening by increasing my knowledge of what is going on.”
e) “It is important that I know what people are thinking. If it is bad news, I can try to head it off at the pass.”
f) “I must know what is going to happen in the future by asking questions in the present. Knowledge is power. When I do not know the future, I feel painfully powerless and out of control. I must find a way to relieve this pain.”

This multi-faceted scenario is not conscious or rational. It has nothing to do with solving real life problems in the present. Since Cliff feels inadequate to cope with life in the present, “control through knowing” is his way of overcompensating for his perceived deficiencies. His solution to this problem cannot work. His problems do not get better, they get worse, and they ultimately turn into a crisis. His life is one crisis after another. When he learns how to cope with life as a self-respecting human being, his crises will come much farther apart. Since Cliff cannot know what people are thinking or what the future will bring, he cannot control his life or prevent the disasters that he predicts for himself. He feels out of control most of the time. He has set himself up for a lifetime of anxiety.

8. Anxiety is a feeling of dread, that something terrible is going to happen at any minute.
As a victim, Cliff lives with anxiety. He is not aware of his anxiety as such because he has become used to it over the years. These are some of the basic assumptions that contribute to anxiety:

a) Cliff feels inadequately prepared to take life as it comes.
b) He lives his life on other peoples’ terms. Since we cannot really know what their terms are, his life is going to be unpredictable and insecure.
c) Since he has no hope of success, he can only predict disaster in the future.
d) He lives in the future in order to keep the feared disaster from happening.
e) He defines security in terms of external and internal defense mechanisms which do not work in the real world.
f) He defines control in bizarre ways that leave him more out of control.
g) Cliff’s anger is out of control. When his anger is out of control, he is out of control. He experiences his out of control anger as anxiety.

9. A major component of Cliff’s anxiety is his anger at himself. When bad things happen, not only does he perceive them as a personal victimization, but he is angry at himself for failing to prevent them from happening in spite of his intense but useless efforts to do so. This anger at himself is out of his conscious control. He is not even aware that it is down there. He is preoccupied with his conscious anger at the source of his current distress, i.e., his boss. This preoccupation keeps him from identifying his self anger. It never goes away. He displaces his self anger onto other people who do not deserve it. Sometimes they displace it right back, confirming his victim role and perpetuating his anxiety.

10. Humorlessness – As with many victims, Cliff makes the twin mistakes of:

a) Taking people seriously when he should not,

b) Not taking them seriously when he should.

He does not have a sense of humor because a lifetime of anticipating victimization precludes the luxury of lightening up and appreciating the absurdity of the human condition. He lacks the adult judgment to discern when people are kidding and when they are not. As a consequence, he reacts inappropriately to most situations and is then victimized. Perversely, he sees humor when other people are victimized. He feels superior to them; he is relieved that it wasn’t him this time.

11. Inappropriate Responsibility – As the victim child in his family, Cliff assumes so much inappropriate responsibility for warding off victimization that he neglects his real responsibilities. Once again, the consequences of his misplaced priorities will be negative. He then assumes responsibility for his victimization, but in the wrong way. “I should have seen it coming,” he says. He feels guilty and angry at himself. He does not learn the right lessons from these disasters, he merely reinforces the wrong ones, over and over.

His wife, Naomi, is an irresponsible victim. She spends her life seeking exemption from her appropriate responsibilities because she feels that she will only fail anyway, so why bother? She “forgets” to pay the bills because she “knows” in advance that she will make a botch of it. She is incapable of seeing how these exemptions from her household tasks may be contributing to her victimization. When Cliff complains about her carelessness, she feels victimized. She says, “It’s not my fault! You made me forget.” This is the flip side of the fault coin. She denies “fault” because she imagines that as long as she remains “faultless” she cannot be punished. This technique, too, works in reverse. It makes Cliff angrier than he was before, and he feels entitles to punish her for making him angry.

When these two fight about finances, they imagine that the issue is money. Money is only the occasion for the real issue, which is preventing spousal victimization. When Naomi asks for food money, Cliff feels taken advantage of, unappreciated and threatened with loss of control over his paycheck. When Cliff says, “No,” Naomi feels forced to submit to his control, as she had to submit to male tyranny in her childhood. She resents it now as she resented it then. She protects, defends, rebels, all in vain. Her coping techniques are no more successful now than when she was nine. These two become super angry at each other without even knowing why. Their perception of victimization arises out of an issue that lies still farther down, their contempt for themselves and for each other. “Anyone who would pick me out is worthy of my contempt and deserves to be treated accordingly.” Their relationship is based on mutual contempt.

Cliff cannot be happy. It would be inconsistent with his role of the victim. He has learned that, for him, happiness is only temporary, so why bother? Not only is happiness short-lived, but Cliff has also learned that it always ends in disaster and that he will be the victim of it. Therefore, he cannot enjoy his brief moments of happiness when they come because he “knows” that they will end painfully at any minute. When his wife tries to make him happy, he sabotages her every time. This is another technique that he uses to prevent disaster. Since Cliff “knows” that his happiness is going to end in disaster anyway, and the suspense is killing him, he brings about the disaster he expects in order to “get it over with,” sooner rather than later. When it happens, it confirms his prophecies of disaster (“I told you so. I knew it was to good to last”); it confirms his role as the victim. It is the only role he has. He has maintained his consistency once again.

12. Super-Sensitivity – When Cliff receives criticism, he mistakenly confuses his personhood with the imperfection being criticized. He may, for instance, confuse his boss’s criticism of his tardiness with the invalidation of his worth as a person. Invalidation is very painful. His super-sensitivity to slights is supposed to be a defense against being hurt, but like most of his “solutions” to his problems, this one doesn’t work, either. Cliff is so busy seeking solace for his wounded feelings that he fails to change the habits that get him in trouble. He is setting himself up for still another “victimization” the next time he is late. He thinks that he is “sensitive,” when in fact he is insensitive to any pain but his own. He confuses his vulnerability to overreacting with “sensitivity”.

13. Fortune-Telling – Cliff, like most victims, spends much of his life in the future:
a) He defines control in terms of preventing bad things from happening; tomorrow,
next week or next year.
b) He consistently prophesies disaster for himself. He does not “deserve” to expect
anything else. He tries so hard to prevent disasters from happening that he fails to live his life in the present tense.
c) He predicts that he is going to be victimized. He can not stand the suspense, so he
arranges to speed the process up. When it does happen, he says, “I knew it would happen.” He cannot see how he arranged to fulfill his negative expectations. It would ruin the whole scenario if he did
Cliff tries to ward off anticipated victimization by pleasing others in the hope that
they will not hurt him. These others sense and resent his ulterior motives in pleasing them. They hold him in contempt and victimize him for his pains. He consistently tries to please the people he shouldn’t please while neglecting to please those he should, such as his employer and his family members.

14. Suffering Pays – Cliff has learned that happiness does not pay. What does that leave? Suffering. At least suffering doesn’t end in disaster and there is no painful suspense. To him, these are all “advantages.” Moreover, Cliff has learned to use his suffering and make it pay-off. It is all he has going for him. If they ever take away his suffering, he would be in big trouble. He would not be able to trade on it; he might even be happy and he “knows” how that would end. This is his private logic and we cannot argue with it. It wouldn’t help if we did.

One negative payoff for his suffering may be the attention that he receives when he suffers. Another payoff may be his feeling of “moral superiority” over those who have not suffered as he has. This type of suffering victim is called “the Martyr.” Some victims use their suffering to exempt themselves from the tasks of life. They feel inadequately prepared to cope with the adult responsibilities of life and can only predict failure for themselves. Their agenda is to prevent their failure by getting out of their responsibilities before it is too late. They want to exempt themselves from their assigned duties and yet still receive the benefits from them. They malinger, they go on sick leave, they do not make him happy, they are the misery that he prefers to the even worse nursery of trying to succeed and failing. Many of them succeed at this for a time. When they fail, it is through the fault of others. In the meantime, they are exempt from guilt, fault, blame and responsibility. It is not their fault that they have this “condition.” They really do not see how they arranged all this as their solution to problems of daily living.

We have made the understandable mistake of taking this victimization or grievance more personally than reality requires us to take it. Our perception of ourselves as a helpless, “stupid” victim results in a dangerous loss of self-worth. We cannot respect people who allow these tragedies to befall them. It happened in our world, so it is somehow our fault, our responsibility. This is a carryover of our childhood feeling of egocentrism, when we stood at the center of our world as we perceived it. This inappropriate attitude from the past sets us up for more pain that we need to feel. We need to sort out the pain that is real from the pain that arises out of mistaken attitudes and other childhood vulnerabilities.

The antidote to this aspect of our suffering is to regain the self-respect that we had before the event. Perhaps our self-respect was built on a shaky foundation. “I can respect myself as long as I don’t encounter any problems that I cannot handle.” According to this self-imposed condition, we can no longer respect ourselves under the present circumstances. We need to replace that definition of self-respect with one that is less conditional and less porous. We need to find a way to experience ourselves as worthwhile human beings in spite of our faults and imperfections, one of which is that we are constitutionally incapable of being in two places at the same time or that we lack the courage to beat off three muggers with loaded guns. These imperfections in our nature are acceptable and we can accept ourselves in spite of them. No one has ever told us that; we must tell ourselves.

As one step in the healing process, we need to regain control of our rage. We can begin to manage our anger by writing an anger letter. It does not matter if someone reads it. It is not for their benefit but for ours. Afterwards, we will be in a stronger position to write the next anger letter, which is harder. The next letter is to ourselves. We need to start writing a letter to ourselves and to see what we bring up from the depths. We can identify specific criticisms that we have towards ourselves, which makes them easier to put in an appropriate perspective. We can use our rational faculties now to see that we are not guilty of being incapable. We need not be angry at ourselves at all. We are angry that it happened and at the undeserved, unfair changes that it makes in our lives. We can choose to write it down and get the anger out before it turns to poison and spreads.

The last stage of the anger management process would be to forgive those who caused this pain. We often balk at forgiving the perpetrator, for we “do not want to give him the satisfaction,” or we do not wish to “condone” his behavior. We may even imagine that we can prevent a repetition of the crime by harboring a grudge against him forever. We cannot forgive because what he did was “wrong;” if it were “right,” we wouldn’t have to forgive him at all. These are all faulty attitudes from our childhood, which impede the healing process. They are based on the false premise that the process of forgiveness is for another’s benefit, which it is not. He will never know about it. It is to help us recover our sanity sooner rather than later.

And who else must we forgive? We must forgive ourselves for our “failure” to foresee the event and prevent it from happening. This anger at ourselves is based on absurd premises, but it is very real. Our emotions do not care whether they are based on solid ground or not. They have no eyes and they cannot see; they have no brains and they cannot think. We have brains and we must think. We must use our adult judgment to make appropriate choices. Then, we must put our choices into action.

One action we can take is to write our forgiveness down in a letter so that we can validate our experience and make it real. Writing it down helps to bridge the gap between our head and our heart. It helps us to repair that which has been torn apart. We need to take action in the real world on our own behalf. If we do not, no one will. In writing our forgiveness letter, we are doing something that victims cannot do. Victims have no power to forgive, self-respecting people do.