The Mindsets You Give Up When You Leave Behind Victim Consciousness

Why shadow hunting is the fastest, most far-reaching way to change your fate

When you’re operating from victim consciousness, you see yourself as the victim of a fate beyond your control. This perspective rears its head when people blame capitalism, corporatism, (pick your favorite-ism) for their struggles.

Leaving behind victim consciousness isn’t about blaming yourself for your suffering, pointing a finger, and saying it’s all your fault. It doesn’t require you to overlook the genuine corruption within people, circumstances, or events.

It’s simply a change in orientation rooted in the knowledge that victimhood drains your energy. It steals your autonomy. The victim orientation feeds into the idea that challenging circumstances, systems, or people have a power that you don’t.

Taking radical responsibility alters your self-concept in a way that almost nothing else does. Instead of being the unlucky subject of a cruel and unusual fate, you become the powerful creator with a fascination for all kinds of experiences, not only the ones that please your ego.

Three Faces of the Victim: The Drama Triangle

The concept of victim consciousness is probably ancient, but it formally originated with the Karpman drama triangle, synthesized by transactional analysis practitioner Dr. Stephen Karpman.

Every dysfunctional interaction, whether with the self or other people, takes place within the drama triangle. This inverted triangle consists of three positions.

• The persecutor believes themselves to be wronged by others. They rely on blame and attack as forms of self-protection.
• The rescuer sees themselves as caretakers. Their self-worth rests on finding someone who needs help and giving it to them (phrases like “What would you do without me?” exits the lips of many rescuers).
• The victim is the put-upon, unlucky subject to cruel people, circumstances, past choices, etc.

Personal growth counselor Lynne Forrest calls the drama triangle the three faces of the victim because if you’re operating within one part of the triangle, it’s only a matter of time until you move into another position.

Although most people have a position they’re most drawn to, when you’re inside the drama triangle you switch roles many times throughout the week, day, and even hour.

Mindset #1: “My bad genes, bad brain chemistry, or bad luck determines my health destiny.”

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to leave behind victim consciousness if you’re a customer of the pharmaceutical industrial complex (i.e. conventional medicine).

Why? Victim consciousness sits at the center of its business model. The pharma-based medical system and its spokespeople treat people as passive recipients of their doctors’ tools.

This system underplays the health impacts of diet and other individual choices while overplaying the role of genetics. It transforms multi-faceted human emotions into impersonal brain chemistry problems. It implicitly views the human body as a machine that requires fixing from a doctor-mechanic.

These perspectives, and the conventional medical mindset in general, perfectly exemplify the drama triangle. The system presents itself as the heroic rescuer equipped and ready to save innocent victims from their prosecuting, primitive, error-prone bodies.

The central problem with the pharmaceutical-medical system is misaligned incentives. Although certain individual doctors may indeed care about the well-being of their patients, they’re ultimately in the service of pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

And it’s in the best interest of these entities if you take a cocktail of prescription drugs to “manage” your “condition” for the rest of your life. The pharma-based healthcare system scoffs at the very concept of healing. It only offers symptom management.

All you can do is wait for guidance from the CDC and try to stay alive until the Experts tell you what to do to stay safe.

Even if the perspectives and products offered by this system weren’t toxic and woefully misguided, healing is a self-directed process, not something that comes in an orange bottle.

Father of psychedelic therapy Dr. Stanislav Grof wrote about how medicinal substances and practitioners can support symptom resolution, but true healing is a self-directed process orchestrated by an inner healing intelligence that exists within all of us.

Just as our bodies automatically initiate repair processes in response to a cut or a scrape, the psyche is also self-correcting. It issues all kinds of responses — whether they’re tears, headaches, or the desire to erect boundaries — intended to restore balance when it’s been lost.

Leaving behind victim consciousness invites you to shift from seeing disturbing sensations or perceptions as purposeless annoyances to be managed by petrochemicals.

Instead, you relate to them as messengers, issued by a wise body with signaling mechanisms that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

Distress is a gateway to change, an invitation to look at and fix what might be misaligned or out of balance. — Own Yourself, Kelly Brogan

When you relate to your physical symptoms or distressing emotions as optimization data telling you about the impacts of what you’re ingesting, valuing, or investing your attention into, it’s very difficult to stay within victim consciousness.

Why? The recognition that your perceptions are purposeful serves as an invitation into a reality dense with meaning, rather than a mechanistic hellscape where meaning is a delusion of reference and suffering is a function-less annoyance better suppressed than felt.

Mindset #2: “I don’t have what I want because I’m worthless, unlucky, and the world is corrupt.”

When swirling within victim consciousness, people believe their lives aren’t working because of their inner badness or the wrongness “out there.” They make prosecutors out of corporatism, the World Economic Forum, or their past experiences.

In Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power, Carolyn Elliott describes an axiom that serves as a powerful antidote to this perspective, which is that

Having is evidence of wanting.

This axiom comes from a psychological pattern noted by Freud, Jung, and Lacan — Human beings have a gnarly habit of getting secret, unconscious pleasure in their suffering.

Echoing the perspectives of these psychological pioneers, Carolyn suggests that upsetting patterns repeat in our lives because our conscious and unconscious minds are woefully divided.

We tell ourselves consciously that we hate being broke, friendless, or creatively blocked. But secretly, those painful emotions are fulfillments for unconscious parts of ourselves that adore these sensations.

“The conscious mind worries about all this ‘bad stuff’ and thinks about how to avoid it, but that worry is secretly (shadowily) a kind of erotic caress, an obsessive dwelling with rapt fascination on the face of the very beloved failure and humiliation.” — Existential Kink, Carolyn Elliott

In the book, Carolyn describes these painful, repetitive patterns as “existential kinks” that only dissolve once you’re willing to consciously embrace and even love them.

Why? Because according to the wise psychologist Carl Jung, our unconscious minds are the generative, receptive parts of us.

As a result, patterns that remain unconscious possess much greater power to shape our lived experiences than those within our conscious minds. By bringing the light of our conscious minds to our unconscious fixations, we dispel their power to direct the course of our lives.

To do this, I’ve found it useful to think about the unconscious payoffs these painful patterns offer. Sometimes unconscious patterns repeat simply because they allow us to stay neatly bound within familiar sensations.

The Existential Kink perspective liberates you from victim consciousness by showing you how your difficult circumstances are the outer reflections of a game you’re playing.

If your current difficult circumstances disappeared, it would only be a matter of time before others took their place. (That is, as long as these fascinations remain unconscious.)

When you realize the problem is internal, it dramatically expands the context from which you narrate your life. You no longer see yourself as the powerless victim of an unfair reality. Instead, you’re a powerful being who could create anything.

But for some meaningful reason, you’re fascinated by the sensations that currently populate your inner landscape. You’re so fascinated that you’ll go out of your way to tell yourself a story to keep them going.

Carolyn suggests using the axiom having is evidence of wanting as an excavation tool that helps you understand why you’re drawn to these specific patterns and not others.

As you explore and understand the purpose of your kinks, you find ways to meet your needs that are less destructive and more conducive to the kind of experiences you consciously want to have.

To get what you want, make peace with the deep, long shadow you’ve been projecting “out there”

“Personal empowerment means reconditioning yourself from the programs of society and putting your own values and programs into place.” — Terence McKenna

Since our early days, we get conditioned into believing our problems are largely products of the cruel external world. This isn’t surprising: the drama triangle infiltrates everything from the media, religious texts, and political rhetoric.

Leaving behind victim consciousness helps you break the spell of assuming your problems exist because of your personal failings or because the world is corrupt.

Again, it’s not that there aren’t legitimate issues that exist beyond your eyes. But sitting back and railing against injustices is a great way to lock yourself inside an orientation that leaves you feeling powerless and miserable.

Leaving behind victim consciousness restores your autonomy. It enlivens you with the creative energy to see beyond your repetitive, disempowering psychological patterns.

This perspective gives you a visceral understanding of your power as a creator that no doomy news story could ever take away from you.

If you know that you’re more powerful than your current circumstances suggest, check out the following (depth psychology-informed) articles about dissolving unconscious programming and creating what you want.