There is a form of self-destruction that feels like protection. It is called: I am the victim, everyone else is to blame.
I know this attitude from the inside. For years I was the poor one. When something did not work, it was down to the circumstances or the people around me. Above all to my parents. They were the address for my blame for years, for much that I should have stood up for myself.
By now we have cleared everything up. I apologised to them in a way that mattered to me. There is peace between us. Precisely because that peace is there, I can look more clearly today at what I was then: a person who wished no one ill and who nonetheless caused a great deal of damage.
That is the point this text circles around. Victimhood appears harmless from the outside, even empathy-drawing. One thinks of oneself: I am the one to whom things happen. I am not hurting anyone. But victimhood is anything but passive. It shifts the responsibility for one’s own life into someone else’s hands, and there it leaves damage.
When I ascribe my failure or my paralysis to your door, then you receive a burden that is not yours. You are supposed to bear the responsibility for the fact that I am doing badly. You are supposed to feel guilty for my standing still. That is a quiet, polite form of violence. It needs no volume and disguises itself as complaint.
It changes the relationship. The other becomes cautious. They watch what they say, reduce themselves, to avoid burdening me further, carry something that was never theirs to carry. That is what the destructive trail of victimhood looks like: no open conflict, but a quiet diminishment of the other.
With my parents it was exactly that. I did not want them ill. I loved them. And yet I made them bearers of my own stories for years. They were supposed to explain why I was as I was, to provide the reason why I was not moving forward. That they could not and did not have to do this, I could not see for a long time.
What became clear to me only late: victimhood is a form of control. As long as I remain the poor one, I do not have to act. As long as the past explains the present, I do not need to risk anything for tomorrow. That is comfortable for me and devastating for those I blame. In the end destructive for me too, because in this attitude I do not grow.
The way out is unspectacular. It begins with taking back responsibility for the next word and the next step. Nothing grand. Just that.
With my parents that is what happened. It took a long time, and it was worth it. What became possible between us, after I had removed the blame from the room, was a form of closeness I could never reach in the victim mindset. Only without the constant accusation did space for love arise.
But only in responsibility for myself does the freedom lie to actually shape my life.
I write this because many people who wish no one ill nonetheless cause a great deal of damage by understanding themselves as the poor ones. I was one of them. Sometimes I still am.
By René Jochum and Claude (Anthropic). License: CC-BY-4.0.