It's your choice: victim or survivor

5 Aug 2010

It's your choice: victim or survivor

Over the years I have experienced adversity from time to time. Unfair and painful things have happened to me and to those I love. For various reasons I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

Many friends and acquaintances have also been undergoing various kinds of adversity - from severe illness to unhappy love affairs. One thing is clear from both my own experience and that of others: a person's response to adversity either builds or destroys character.

I think Helen Keller put it well:

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

But it often seems that those who come through adversity as deeper and wiser individuals are the ones who finally choose to be a survivor rather than a victim.

This choice is one of mindset. The individual who sees them self as a survivor has experienced adversity, be it physical or emotional trauma, and has decided not to let that pain rule their future.

But the victim is one who has chosen to hold onto the pain (and sometimes even to wallow in that pain). Once a person makes the choice to remain in a victim mindset they move into victimhood. They often take up and carry the burden of their victimhood and share it far and wide.

Victimhood is an essentially self interested and self focused perspective. It is all about 'me'. It means that person is likely to find it difficult to look outwards from their self towards another.

None of this is to say that the pain we experience through adversity is not real. It is not saying that unfair or unpleasant things were not real experiences. But it is saying that to live a full life we need to move past those things and choose to leave behind the unnecessary burdens of victimhood.

As I see it, when we come to this choice it is a fork in the possible roads we can take. We need to choose wisely through our pain. One road leads to a much worse place than the other. One road leads to a stronger character with wisdom and growth - that of the survivor.

over 1 year ago Tim Hill responded:

I think I can see what you are getting at here – that because you perceive that you have choices, then other people should be able to see their choices and be equally able to act on them.

There are a couple of reasons that I can’t agree. The first is that my academic training in infant and childhood development quite clearly shows that the influences that an infant, child and adolescent are exposed to shape the very structure of their brain. Through this shaping, certain responses become habituated in them, but even more profoundly, certain forms of thinking become habituated. Our forms of thinking are tightly interlaced with our emotional beings, which becomes the single most powerful informant of the way the world looks to us.

Secondly, this is reinforced by the clinical work that I do. Time and time again, I see clients who just don’t know some of things that I know. Clients who have never been able to reflect on the things they do. Who cannot differentiate themselves from other people. Who require – not just ‘prefer’ - constant levels of active support to have their core self remain cohered. When they don’t remain cohered, many of them start to lose the ability to function as parents and partners and employees, and when this starts it can turn into a deterioration that becomes harder and harder to stop, let alone recover the lost ground. In essence, not all people always have the same choices that we do, and even when they do, they can’t always see them. Even for those that see them, a significant portion cannot reliably and consistently carry them through. A loss of place of living, of employment or family estrangement often means that all efforts are then focussed on immediate survival needs.

And this is just the results of a ‘normal’ upbringing. I’m deliberately leaving out the extreme cases here where lives are significantly compromised through events in their formative years.

In a sense you are right – we are all the same. But while it can be convenient to assume that others have the same capabilities as us and to judge them when they don’t, an empathic involvement in their life and time in spent in trying to understand will often reveal a deeper level of similarity. It reveals that people want to make an honourable life for themselves, earn self respect and the respect of others and look after those within their responsibility. Their inability to consistently do this (and I’ll say it again for emphasis, inability to consistently do this) is a source of shame for them and this shame is corrosive to the small, hard-won victories they have. An off-hand dismissal of their legitimate suffering can add to this shame, and this is what they often experience. This does not give people a 'wake-up call' like some suggest, but rather only intensifies the problem.

My apologies if the brevity of my response leaves all this a little unclear.

thoughtstream

It's your choice: victim or survivor

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