THE META-STATE OF RESILIENCE Part IV: Refusing Being a Victim

As the worldwide recession continues, Are you a victim of the recession? Ah, yes, it could be very easy to feel that way, to interpret things through that frame, couldn’t it? And many people, to their own detriment, are doing that.

I’ve been writing about resilience, about suffering a set-back, about being knocked down, and about developing a “learned optimism” at your core and proactively developing resources that will put bounce in your soul so that whatever happens, you have the ability to just get up again and get busy solving the problems that life throws your way. When it comes to resilience, the continuum of choices before you is that of feeling like and acting like a victim on one end and access the meta-state of resilience on the other.

Now the victim polar is actually an easy one and one that’s seductive for lots of people. In fact, given “the media’s” tendency to look for and highlight sensational stories of tragic and for people who have suffered something, and the way people all around us talk, we are all culturalized to a great extent to divide the world into people who victimize and those who are victims. We think in either-or terms to make things simple: bad people hurt good people out of the blue and make them victims of their cruelty.

This way of thinking shows up in how most everybody seem highly liable and skilled in the art of blaming. Something bad happens, we suffer a set-back, and the next thing that happens in our brains— we go looking for someone or something to blame. We didn’t do it, certain people made us do or experience something. We didn’t do it, it was an event, a situation, our parents, our teachers, etc. that caused it. We look for causation and while we may not know who or what caused us to experience whatever we experienced, we know it was not us, so we look around with eyes set on finding out who or what did it so we can accuse them.

Opposite to being a victim, to being victimized is being an empowered resilient. This state operates from the realization, and the lifestyle, that you can always do something, that you are an active player in that game of life, and that you do have the power to positively affect things. It is being responsible, holding yourself responsible, and looking to yourself for the role that you played in any given situation. If you are accepting, assuming, and acknowledge your role, how you are part of any system, then you can’t be a victim. No one “set you aside” and did something to you. [The literal meaning of “victim.”] The only exception would be if you were minding your own business and a madman ran out of a building being chased by the police and he grabbed you as a hostage or shot you to slow the police down. And that’s a very, very infrequent type of situation.

If you access a victim state, then you have to keep dis-empowering yourself, you have to keep avoiding the present and taking action today to do something. Do that even a little bit and you begin to move toward the resilience end of the continuum, and you’ll start to feel better and to change things.

To be a victim, keep playing the hurt, the set-back, the undesirable problem over and over in your mind. And especially keep looking for someone to blame! Refuse to face your role in whatever happened. Assume no responsibility whatsoever. Refuse to even consider that you were part of the system and that you played a part in it all. And if you do become aware of something you did or didn’t do that played into it, immediately create excuses. Whether the excuses are brilliant or stupid, create them so you can escape being responsible. Play dumb, play weak, just do not accept that you had any choice.

To be a victim you will need some powerful limiting beliefs. Believe that the world of people, events, and circumstances determines what and how you think and feel. Believe that all you can do is react, and never respond. Believe that you have no true choice, that things happen, that fate determines life, that you are unable to effect change. To be a powerful victim—to play lots of “what if...” and “if only” tapes in your mind and use them in your languaging:

“If only I could get a break...”

“If only I had the intelligence, looks, or good fortune that John or Jill has.”

“But what if something goes wrong? What if someone laughs at me?”

To deepen the victimhood, then use catastrophic language that exaggerates:

“I could never stand it if someone rejected me.”

“It’s the end of all of my hopes and dreams, I’ll never recover from this.”

“Why did X do that to me? Why didn’t I resist? What’s wrong with X?”

If that’s how to develop a victim strategy, to the other side of the continuum and step up to resilience, do the opposite. Change that kind of thinking and languaging to acknowledge your powers of response.

“I can always do something.”

“They can’t take away from me the ultimate human freedom— the freedom to choose my response and attitude.” (Viktor Frankl)

One has to assume response-ability: “I can and will choose responses that will increase my chances for succeeding.” “I refuse to torment myself with ‘what could have been,’ or live by regretting the past.” And of course, to fast track this, hire a Meta-Coach to coach you for self- actualizing resilience or find a Neuro-Semantic Trainer who is running the Resilience Workshop.