Why Playing The Victim Role Is Not Always For Your Benefit
Advantages and disadvantages of playing the “Victim Role”
If you do believe that the world has treated you unfairly, or you’re always a victim of circumstances, or nothing that goes wrong is your fault, then you might have a victim mentality.
As you will see in the end, the disadvantages clearly outweigh the advantages, especially in the long term. This realization is important because as long as you think that your victim's behavior will bring you more benefit, you are not ready to change anything. But if you realize that and how you are harming yourself and others, your perspective can change.
Advantages of playing the “Victim Role”
It’s like with drug addicts. The reasons why someone becomes a victim are — just like the reasons why someone becomes a drug addict — as different as the people and their stories.
However, you can say
Victims and junkies see at least short-term benefits in their behavior …
… which are actually not advantages at all, as we will see later.
Often they even feel a kind of elation
1. Benefits of self-pity
Attention: If you feel bad, you will be pitied. And even if compassion is not really desirable, it is a form of attention. You may even get more care and support and think that it will make your life a little easier.
Pulling others down: Sounds strange, but that’s how it is. Victims feel better when they can pull others into their hole too. Because they can’t get out of there by themselves and at least don’t want to sit in there alone.
Brief relief: Howling convulsions and outbursts of anger also generate attention. You can also let out all the pent-up emotions.
Sense of belonging: You can moan together, experience a community and encouragement.
2. Benefits of finger-pointing
White vest: Definitely. If you can blame others for your suffering, you are innocent yourself. It is not you and your poor performance at school that are to blame for the fact that you have not had a career, but rather your past, the educational system, and, above all, Mr. President of the US.
Positive self-image: You don’t have to deal with your own shortcomings and you always have another scapegoat ready. By denouncing and knowing better, you may even feel superior to others.
Support in the group: In addition, assigning blame can also create a group feeling. When you connect with others to join their lamentations and denounce “those up there” or whoever you are, you will feel validated and accepted and maybe even stronger. You are trying to take back some of the power that you give yourself up.
3. Benefits of excuses
Less strenuous in the short term: excuses serve one purpose: not having to do something. You can always shift the actual work off of you or put it off in front of you.
Not being responsible: In your eyes, not deciding also means not making the wrong decision, which leads us back to the subject of guilt, not wanting to be guilty and rather assigning the guilt to others.
Positive image to the world: On top of that, you think that you are still not seen as lazy because you always have a good reason for not being able to do something. This is of course a mistake. The only one who falls for this façade is yourself. Everyone knows someone who always has an excuse for everything. In truth, you will stand out even more.
Attention: Through lies and exaggerations, you promise yourself a moment in the center that is supposed to push your battered ego for a short time.
4. Advantages of convenience
Ease: Life is exhausting. Shaping your own life is even more exhausting. Leaning back and leaving everything in chance makes things a lot easier for the moment.
Hope: You can hope and wait for something or someone to miraculously solve your problems or make everything better. But what’s the problem with that? It will never happen!
Others do the work for you: The only thing that might happen for a short time is for others to do the uncomfortable work for you. But only until they see how you are taking advantage of them.
5. Advantages of comparing
Security: Victims are inherently insecure. By constantly comparing them with others, they try to sound out their status and to achieve a little supposed security.
Timetable: In addition, they want to find out in this way what is important in society and how they can receive recognition because they lack internal values of their own.
Good feeling/superiority: It can actually produce a brief feeling of happiness when you really notice that you are actually doing better than others at one point. But most of the time you lose out when comparing.
Justification: But even if you do worse in comparison, this offers you the supposed advantage of reinforcing your role as a victim and underlining how disadvantaged you actually are. Keyword “self-pity”. Or you can use it to find further excuses and trivializations such as “But they do it that way too…”.
Complain: In addition, you can raise yourself above others despite or because of your poorer position. After all, the others don’t deserve success at all and you should actually be much more entitled to it.
Distract from yourself: Finally, of course, it is always helpful to know the flaws and shortcomings of others to distract from your own.
6. Benefits of self-righteousness
Self-esteem/self-image: Because you have great self-doubts, you try to convince everyone and in the end also yourself of how important you are.
Superiority: Because you cannot increase yourself through your own performance or your self-worth, you try to put others down to look a little better yourself. (But your fellow human beings also see through that quickly).
Escape Forward: Feeling attacked is an easy way out when you run out of business arguments or you just can’t or don’t want to admit that you made a mistake.
Assertion: Victims naturally avoid unpleasant confrontation through passive-aggressiveness. At the same time, they promise a kind of “educational effect” for their counterparts and they get satisfaction when the others finally get what they deserve for their behavior. So they want the best of both worlds, harmony, and control, but mostly achieve exactly the opposite.
Homicide arguments: Appealing to higher rights or turning the words on others’ mouths is the end of any factual discussion. If you just don’t want to understand someone, even the best arguments can’t harm you. It makes you feel like you have the upper hand, but really you’re just pulling yourself away in a cowardly way.
Temporary power: Exercising power over others gives a brief feeling of sublimity and often serves as compensation for the rest of the time when you feel so powerless and helpless.
Going back to these familiar patterns of victimizing over and over again is convenient and brings short-term benefits, but in the end, it only harms you and does not help you.
It’s the same principle that addicts keep succumbing to their addiction.
Disadvantages of playing the “Victim Role”
There is no question that the role of the victim has a few compelling advantages. The problem is that all of these supposed benefits are very short-lived. Usually, the opposite effect follows shortly afterward.
As is so often the case in life, the role of the victim is
The more you want to achieve something, the less you get it.
It is the principle of holding on with which we make life difficult for ourselves again and again.
But how exactly does the role of the victim make life difficult for us?
1. Disadvantages of self-pity
Self-fulfilling Prophecy: It is a vicious circle. Anyone who constantly emphasizes that he is oh so bad, his life will not change for the better. On the contrary
Your thoughts become your reality.
And what you believe for yourself becomes your self. Your subconscious is constantly trying to implement the mental images that you paint for it. If you keep painting black, your world will not get brighter and more colorful. Especially not if the words “always” and “never” are anchored in your thoughts.
Self-doubt: If you constantly question yourself, you of course only feed your negative self-image further…
People keep their distance: On top of that, you drive away from the people from whom you hope for attention. Even the strongest and most stable person will not go along with it in the long run. Especially not when he has reached a certain level of self-love and has recognized that he is suffering from an emotional dependence here. Of course, this can lead to the whiner feeling even more “abandoned” and the vicious circle worsening.
“Anyone who surrenders to self-pity can only expect sympathy from this side.”
(Benjamin Franklin)
Helplessness: By far the most decisive disadvantage is that self-pity promotes the feeling of helplessness and powerlessness. And whoever feels helpless at the mercy of a situation or even life, is not only constantly frustrated but also further incapacitates himself. The chronic victim role arises.
2. Disadvantages of finger-pointing
Guilt blocked: We don’t want to look for a solution together with a guilty party. And a guilty party usually does not want to do the same with the person who accuses him. This only leads to more mutual blame and the fact that the fronts harden more and more.
Anger, anger, hatred, and dissatisfaction: these are the consequences. Not to mention the fact that you naturally strengthen your role as a victim by shifting all responsibility.
Dependency: When you blame others, you are giving them power over you at the same time. You even put your happiness and peace of mind in the hands of others and then complain about the fact that you can not change your situation.
Isolation: You are increasingly isolating yourself from those around you. Whereby it is more your environment that is looking for space. After all, who likes to be constantly accused or to be surrounded by chronic whiners and know-it-alls?
Hardening: To do this, you seek more contact with like-minded people, because they strengthen your position. The more victims you have around you, the more fatal your own victim attitude will be.
Inner attitude: With this behavior, you also cultivate the constant search for guilty parties. It becomes your standard reaction and often self-reflection and personal growth are no longer possible.
Retaliation: In addition, you are likely often resentful, wanting to settle old bills or even take revenge. Of course, that only leads to more explosive material and even more guilt — leave it!
Distance from yourself: The constant verbal distancing from your mistakes and thus also your own responsibility leads to the fact that “ you” distance yourself from yourself. And as you move further and further away from the part that is responsible for a situation, it becomes more and more difficult to find it again and to change something.
3. Disadvantages of excuses
Unpopularity: … with colleagues, acquaintances, friends, and even family. Who would like to have to do with someone who always talks himself out when it matters and because of whom you may have even more work?
In the long run exhausting: In addition to the obvious bad image of the world, such people naturally only harm themselves in the end. It sometimes takes more effort and energy for excuses to persuade them to keep talking or to maintain their complex lies than if they just did the real work.
No chance: You take the chances to grow and improve because development and success can only take place while doing.
Every excuse is one less chance!
The only thing you’ll get better at is making excuses. In particular, the excuse “I just can’t do it” is the biggest stick you can throw yourself between your legs. Why do you think that others can do what you can’t? Because they never tried and always insisted that they couldn’t?
Powerlessness: Anyone who is always afraid to make their own decisions and shape their own lives inevitably feels at the mercy of the circumstances. Food for chronic victim husbandry.
Embossing: Constant misunderstanding and misinterpretation also lead to a vicious circle. Those who practice the pattern over a long period of interpreting everything that has been said to their disadvantage naturally create the best basis for a world in which everything and everyone seems to be against them.
Disregard: Fibbing and exaggerating in particular lead to the fact that you are taken less and less seriously.
“Whoever shouts ”fire“ is hard to believe.”
… says a proverb. This, of course, can increase your thirst for attention, which can make things worse.
4. Disadvantages of convenience
Self-sabotage: A hand will never come down from the clouds and lay the life you want in front of your feet. You have to do it yourself. And if you don’t, then you will just be done… by life. “Act or you will be treated,” says another saying.
Hope: Yes, you read that right. Hope is a disadvantage. Because hope paralyzes you and makes you dependent. As long as you are hoping that your problem will be magically solved, you are not 100% committed to it. Maybe a miracle will happen after all? Spoiler warning: it won’t happen …
Drama: But it gets really bad when you ever wish that something happened in your life so that you can find an easy and comfortable way out of your situation. Maybe even something really bad…
You wish to be at the mercy to escape your helplessness.
Success killer: In addition to the fact that you drive away your fellow human beings with your convenience, you of course also take away any chance to grow and become good and successful in something. Studies show that success comes through repetition. Those who do a lot automatically get better and better. Whoever avoids as much work as possible simply stays on the same level.
“Whoever does what he can already do, always remains what he already is.”
(Henry Ford)
Demotivation: Of course, this also prevents motivation from arising in the first place. Those who do not make progress are usually not motivated to make any effort. Those who are lazy will always be lazy because nature takes from us what we do not use. “Use it or lose it” is the motto. That goes for muscles, intelligence, and whatever other skills you think you have. Here, too, the vicious circle is perfect.
Life becomes even more exhausting: There is a paradoxical connection in life
When you do the simple, your life becomes difficult. When you do the hard, your life becomes easy.
Not only because comfortable people naturally have much more limited options, but also because they simply do not develop competence. Anyone who learns the ability to face challenges early on and to endure tough times will develop a level of resilience and future challenges will become easier and easier for them.
Just like climbing rock faces becomes easier and easier for a mountaineer through training. But if you moan when you have to take out the garbage, you will suffer a lot more if, for example, you have to look after a child.
5. Disadvantages of comparisons
No inner strength: By constantly striving for recognition and security from others, you make it impossible for yourself to achieve true inner strength and security.
You are undermining your own self-worth because you care more about other people’s opinions than your own.
Falling recognition: Other people quickly notice that you are just a “flag in the wind” and always turn to where the greater advantage blows. In this way, you are sabotaging the recognition that you wish for yourself. Especially if you try to emphasize your performance by comparing it to others, for example, colleagues, it seems rather poor according to the motto “He needs it”.
Dissatisfaction: In addition, comparing makes you dissatisfied. You always find someone who is better, smarter, more beautiful, or richer than you at something. And especially in our modern networked world, the next opportunity to feel bad is just a click away on Instagram. Envy, even more insecurity, and even less self-worth are the result.
Comparing is the end of happiness and the beginning of dissatisfaction.
Deterrence: You deprive yourself of any motivation to try something because you already know 10 people who are better at it. That in turn feeds your comfort. And because you just don’t do anything, you are of course worse off compared to everyone else.
Even more comparisons: This then further increases your predicament and thus your victim's attitude. Anyone who constantly loses while comparing compares themselves even more because they finally want to win (vicious circle). And of course, you train your brain to use this pattern over and over again.
Ruthlessness: The trivialization leads to the fact that you hold on to your harmful behavior and become more and more unscrupulous.
6. Disadvantages of self-righteousness
Ingratitude: If you keep asking and not appreciating anything, you will never be happy. On the contrary: you will only expect and demand more than what the world supposedly owes you and only get it less.
Declining recognition: The more you try to shine in front of others, the less true recognition you will get from them.
Unpopularity: Feeling better about yourself by blaspheming about others only works for a short time, if at all. In the long run, you do not harm others, only yourself. On the one hand, of course, you only make yourself unpopular with everyone, because anyone who gossips about Kelly in the presence of Julia also gossips about Julia with Kelly. On the other hand, you are only training your brain again to focus on the negative sides, which keeps the vicious circle going.
“There are people who are unbearable for sheer excellence.”
(Elbert Hubbard)
Fear/distrust: The curious thing is that especially those who blaspheme others often claim that they are being blasphemed. This is because it is their own means of choice and we tend to want to recognize familiar patterns in our environment. Just as we recognize faces in clouds because we are used to recognizing faces in everyday life.
Incorrigibility: If you are quickly attacked and personally offended, you are only consolidating the pattern of seeing hostility in everything. And of course, that only makes you a victim even more. Quite apart from the fact that you can of course never learn from your mistakes and grow from them, since you always distract from them with your outrage.
Conflicts: aggressiveness leads to counter-aggressiveness. Regardless of whether it is passive or active.
“Just as you call into the forest, it echoes out.”
Even more victims: Compensating for one’s powerlessness by letting others feel one’s supposed power is a cruel birthing machine for victims. Those who assume the role of victim in the relationship and, for example, are under the slipper at home with their partner, let their frustration out to his employees. Anyone who feels that they have been treated unfairly at work takes it out on their family at home, etc. Victims create even more victims…
As long as you feel that you have been treated unfairly, you treat others unfairly as well.
Self-pity: The icing on the cake is that your self-righteous action and the “I filter” with which you perceive everything only promote your self-pity and the cycle of sacrifices starts all over again.
Consider that you are always an influence for others who copy your behavior! With your victim attitude, you nourish the victim attitude of others. Imagine how far it can go, especially if you have children…
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