Tuesday, March 14: Victimhood Addiction

VICTIMHOOD ADDICTION
I’ve never read the book, but I love the title: Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer. I have a client, we’ll call Sam, who is busy using their mind as a self slayer. No matter how good the lesson, Sam’s mind at the end of the lesson goes back to this mantra: I’m getting worse, I’m getting worse, I’m getting worse.

In another book, Why People Don’t Heal, Caroline Myss speaks of how people get addicted to the role of victim, the way it gives their life a definition, the way they always have an excuse when they fail to achieve their wishes, the subtle or not so subtle power their victimness gives them over people around them, the way it gives them an out from ever using their minds to come up with anything new to say. She suggests this for the friends of professional victims: listen to their story three times and then tell them, “No more.” Walk away or tell them to stop if they try the story more than three times.

It is almost like victims feel they are winning some war on whoever or whatever they blame for their misfortune: so and so will see how much I am suffering and feel badly and I’ll get even. Kind of like the foolish thinking of suicides: so and so will feel really guilty, if I kill myself. Maybe so and so will, for awhile, and then they can go to a movie or read a book or eat a fresh peach. These options are now closed to the dead provers that they are right.

This is it with the professional victim: it is more important to put attention on proving how right they are about how bad their case is than putting their attention where it will be useful.

And where would that be: on four places;
1) The present. If big pain is happening, so be it. Put attention on the exact nature of the pain: in my right hand I have a pain one inch by half and inch by three quarters of an inch. It is sharp and slightly burning. In my mid arm, I don’t have this pain. Now I am breathing in, now I am breathing out. When I follow my breathing the pain is slightly less compelling. When I put my attention of being relaxed in my ribs, the pain is slightly less compelling. Now my mind is starting the, “I’m getting worse, I’m falling apart story.”

2) Do the Work of Byron Katie on the story if the attention can’t be kept in the present. Write down the story, ask four questions and turn it around. Try, in the turn around part substituting “my thinking” for “my body,” so “my body is getting worse and worse” becomes “my thinking is getting worse and worse.”


3) Have curiosity about what is possible within whatever pain is up. Can I still move my tongue? How about my little toe? Is walking possible? Can I sit and sway side to side? Back and forth? What happens when I breathe in with my stomach out? What happens when I breathe out with my stomach out? How could I more easily roll over in bed or on the floor, how more easily come from sitting to standing? What strength and flexibility can I develop now.

4) Sense of humor. Hard, sure, but how can I laugh at and make fun of my own sense of self pity and trappedness? How can I find aspects of life to delight and amuse me?

All good things to do no matter what, wouldn’t you say?