How I Triumphed Against Victim Mentality Even Though I Was Terrified
Bugs! Everywhere!
I was making dinner. As the stove heated up the kitchen, clouds of tiny white flies started swarming.
They got between me and the frying pan, so I couldn’t see.
They flew too close to the glass stovetop, and popped.
One even hit me in the face!
You see, we’d brought eight tomato plants inside during a freakishly early Colorado snow, at the height of the tomatoes’ productive season. After we picked the tomatoes, my husband wanted to see if we could keep them through the winter. It would help us to get a head start on next year’s garden.
At first, it seemed to be working. The tomatoes were producing more blossoms. They were setting fruit.
And then…bugs! Everywhere!
You know how most of the iceberg is under the water?
Turns out, the same thing is true of plant pests. The ones you see are only a fraction of the total.
You need to turn the leaves over, to see the larvae underneath.
Spraying the handful of white flies we’d seen on the leaves did nothing to kill the hundreds of larvae underneath each leaf… the thousands of flies waiting patiently to hatch.
Which they did, when exposed to the heat of the stove.
The bad situation gets even worse
I checked the plants near the sliding glass doors to the back garden. And discovered white flies were the least of our problems.
Those plants were infested with spider mites. They were crawling all over the vertical blinds. And covered the glass so I couldn’t even see outside.
This was war!
My husband and I dragged the plants onto the back porch, where they could die as nature intended. Then I got out the gallon of 3-in-1 bug spray, and went to town on the bugs they’d left behind.
Those bugs had met their match!
Unfortunately, so did the vertical blinds. They were now soaked in bug spray, with dead spider mites stuck to them.
The allure of victim thinking
I could have been angry at my husband. After all, keeping the tomatoes past harvest had been his idea. He’d also failed to treat the problem when it had first appeared.
I could have been angry at the bug spray company. Their advertisements clearly indicated that the number of bugs would decrease after spraying. And their instructions said nothing about spraying the underside of the leaves.
That’s victim thinking. That lets you feel momentarily good about yourself — it’s not my fault! But overall, it leaves you feeling powerless.
If something bad isn’t your responsibility, then you’re not responsible for anything good, either. Your life is completely out of your control.
Even if something good does happen, you weren’t responsible for it. So you’re not responsible for ensuring you keep it.
You could get a promotion, because your boss felt like giving you one.
And next week, you could get fired, because your boss felt like doing that.
There’s no way to plan for the future or strive to improve, because your actions are not directly tied to your results.
It’s because of other people…the way the world works…even the will of God.
Your actions don’t matter.
Victim thinking feels so good in the moment! I have a phobia about bugs, so maybe I didn’t need to use an entire gallon of bug spray. But all that fear and anxiety needed an outlet.
It was so easy to blame my husband. To blame the bug spray company. Even to blame the Colorado weather than led to the plants being indoors in the first place.
And I admit, there was screaming. A lot of screaming. Mostly incoherent screaming, except for the word “bugs” which was repeated emphatically and at high volume.
Look for the opportunity
Once my adrenaline-fueled shaking had stopped, and every bug I could see was lying dead in a pool of bug spray, I took a moment to cool down.
This is where victim mentality can really get its hooks into you. Once the crisis is over, you can start assigning blame for the situation.
Instead, I accepted that I had agreed to allowing the plants indoors. When they had started appearing sickly, I hadn’t cared enough to figure out why. Honestly, I hoped they’d die so I could have my kitchen back. When the first tiny flies and black dots had started appearing on leaves, I sprayed them and considered the problem solved, without doing any further research.
I turned away from victim mentality, and looked for the opportunity.
What had I learned from this experience? (Don’t ever grow tomatoes in my kitchen.)
What was I going to do better next time? (Treat infestations earlier.)
And most importantly, how could I use this situation to improve my circumstances?
The easy answer to that was the vertical blinds. They were no good — stained with bug spray and covered in dead spider mites. They had to go.
Even when they were unstained and pristine, the south-facing window they covered let blinding sunlight through the gaps. This made eating, working, or playing games at the table painful to impossible during certain times of day.
Replacing standard vertical blinds with a four-panel sliding blind instantly elevated the experience of sitting at the kitchen table. Which I could now do comfortably at any hour of the day or night!
Without the bugs, I’d never have spent the money on new blinds.
Conclusion
Next time you’re faced with a situation where you feel like a victim, stop and take a moment. Ask yourself:
- What have I learned?
- What will I do better?
- And most importantly, how can I use the situation to improve my circumstances?
You, too, may find yourself saying, “Bugs! Everywhere! What wonderful opportunity did they bring?”
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