Victim mentality is when someone feels as if they were a victim of negative actions of others, and behave in such manner even when there is sufficient contrary evidence for such circumstances. In other words, feeling as if things are bound to go wrong specifically for you, and every thing that goes wrong is to make your life harder or to make you suffer. It is an acquired personality trait, rather than an inherent one. This means that everyone can fall into this mentality at some point in their life, and it often happens without you realizing it. Not only do you start to be more and more negative and angry in life, you also start to feel as if there is no one around for you. That is because you are not willing to listen to anyone who tries to bring you away from your gloominess and your vicious cycle of blame. Truth is, everyone in life comes across problems in their life, but some people chose to workaround them while others tend to associate those problems, and thereby the related solutions to those problems, to other people. As I said before, this is not an inherent quality, but an acquired one. So, you need to be actively aware and mindful of what your approach in life is for dealing with obstacles.
Three of the most common type of scenarios leading up to this pitfall are as follows:-
1. Element of Surprise
No matter what you are doing in life, be at a very complex project or just relax on your day-off, you always have a rough plan to follow. These are the things that you wither have to do or you want to do. Anything that prevents you from doing these things is what we call a “surprise.” Surprises are meant to throw your pre-defined routine and your scheduled plans right out of the window. When such a situation arrives, however, people are likely to feel frustration upon their inability to do anything against it or the “additional” work that they would have to put in to allow things to go back to their normal routine. This work is additional because it resulted from a surprise event and not from a well defined plan.
Most people would find it much easier to blame this new event on someone else, so that they can escape this frustration. This is the start of you developing this negative mindset, because no matter who you try to blame, ultimately you will be responsible for your own actions in life. Just because you found a scapegoat for your frustration, does not mean that the “surprise” obstructing your daily plans will just go away. IT will only be equivalent to closing your eyes and saying that the danger will go away. Instead, you should always try to accept the change, understand it and focus on how it effects your ability to do the things you wanted to do. No matter what comes, your goal should still be the same. And you should not feel content by not doing what you set out to do just because you pinned it on someone else.
2. Overestimation Ruins Expectations
Most people tend to think that they are special. That they are different or even superior to people around them, and possess qualities that are rarely seen among others. Unfortunately, thinking that does not make it true. If it did, we would have numerous prodigies running around at every corner of the street. This overestimation about your own abilities also results in you underestimating the difficulty of the task at hand. People begin to establish impractical goals for them that are possible for their mental version of themselves and not for where they actually are in life. This eventually leads them to a point where their unrealistic expectations meet with reality – leading to two choices. First, and the harder of the two, is to accept that your expectations were exaggerated and lower them. Or the second one to just feel as if you were the victim and blame this mismatch on someone else’s actions. This one should be avoided at all costs because it does not help you in attaining your goal at all. It only allows you to be okay with not achieving it.
The truth is that you are indeed special in your life, because no one else can be the main character if your own story. No one else will always strive for what is best for you, as they might not even know what you want in life most of the times. You should not confuse you being special with you being better than others. The latter one comes with you identifying your own strengths first and then laboriously working on them to really shine among others.
3. Priorities Do Change Over Time
One complaint people often have is that they feel stuck in doing the things they do not want to do, but have no choice to go in a different route. It is often not because of themselves, but because of someone else in their life. Maybe it is a job that you keep doing because you have someone depending on you or maybe you want to keep going just for the sake of keeping up an image among your peers or your family. It does not matter what the exact situation is, but this situation only leads to you feeling frustrated from one end and then turning it into resentment towards others. This is not helpful to you, and you should realize that your priorities and values change over time in life. This is not always a reason for blame on someone else, but rather quite natural.
In such a situation, you should ask yourself why you got into this situation in the first place and what your thoughts and plans were at that time. Then you should calmly analyse how these gradually changed into the current feeling of frustration and resentment. The first response people give in such situations is to just leave what you do not like and pursue what you do have interest in. I do think that it is a good advice, but I feel that is should be done only after you have first answered the above mentioned questions for yourself. After all, how you got here will have insights into how you can avoid coming here again in the future. No one in this world will understand you better than yourself, even if you do not currently understand anything about yourself. Understand your situation’s circumstances and fix yourself before you set out to find faults in others. Good luck!
