2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Being a victim doesn't seem attractive - indeed, who likes to feel helpless all the time? Nevertheless, many take on this role every now and then. What benefits does the victim seek and how to stop being one?
I recently talked about the Karpman Triangle, a social interaction model that puts most people in the role of Rescuer, Persecutor, or Victim from time to time, and talked in detail about who a Rescuer is and why being one isn't so good. Today I will talk about the role of the Victim - not so attractive, but just as controversial.
The victim - who is she and where is the beginning?
Most often, the position of the Victim is laid in childhood. The child considers the parents (or other significant adults) to be ideal and loves them with unconditional love. If adults violate a child's trust - for example, by abuse or their own destructive habits - love begins to be associated with suffering. This is how the behavior of the Victim is formed: the child grows up with the habit of enduring, experiencing pain, not being able to change something, living in constant fear. The same thing happens with excessive care: "Let me do it, you are too small, you still won't succeed, you always break everything." The attitudes learned in this way - "I am bad, I spoil everything, still nothing will come of it" - can severely limit the life of an adult, therefore the Victims live with a constant feeling of guilt and the awareness of their own worthlessness. When a maturing person does not have the opportunity to control his actions, make mistakes and learn from their consequences, an infantile personality grows out of him, which is easier for him to give up and let others lead his life.
For the Victim, “helplessness” is equal to “guilt,” and the chain of her reasoning is like a vicious circle: “I didn’t do it, so they are unhappy with me. They are unhappy with me, therefore, I am to blame. If I am guilty, I will be punished. And even if it’s not my fault, I’m too weak and insignificant to prove it. Since I am insignificant, it means that I can not control what is happening - so I failed."
Occupying a sacrificial corner in a triangle, a person condemns himself to suffering and pain. Few people enjoy living with the feeling that they are a burden to those around them. After all, the Victim is to blame for the fact that the life of the Rescuer revolves around her, and for the fact that the Persecutor is constantly unhappy. Add to this the suppression of the natural desire for a healthy person to live their own life - and you get the classic picture of constant stress. With such components, it is no wonder that Victims often suffer from neuroses and depression.
Is it profitable to be a Sacrifice
There is a difference between feeling like a Sacrifice and playing a role. In addition to those who are sincerely confident in their vulnerability and powerlessness, there are those who skillfully use this mask. The Victim's position is great for manipulating others while staying in the shadows. After all, if you think about it, the Victim is full of secondary benefits: you can not take responsibility, not make decisions, not assess possible risks and allow others to rake the consequences of their actions.
Not being able can be very beneficial. You may not be able to earn without forgetting to spend - let the husband (the Rescuer) provide. You may not be able to plan expenses and not think about tomorrow - let the parents (Rescuers) take care of it. You may not know how to clean or cook, but have a great time playing tanks, while your wife (Rescuer) does everything important around the house. In response to any suggestion to solve the problem constructively, the Rescuer hears from the Victim a number of arguments why this is impossible. But the real answer is the same: because the manipulator has no desire to change something. His only desire is to be in the spotlight. So an eternally sick mother, around whom the whole family dances, in fact, can turn out to be a gray eminence who keeps the house in tight-knit gloves, a silly blonde who is not able to make a decision - a prudent predator using a partner.
By publicly denying their own ability to make decisions and take care of themselves, manipulative Victims actually enjoy hidden control. But sooner or later a moment comes when they get bored with this role and want public recognition of their ingenuity. Striving to become equal to the Rescuer or having to fight back the Persecutor leads to a role reversal. The blonde starts her own business, and the eternally sick mother leaves for Thailand and has a young lover there. The victim becomes the Persecutor or Rescuer, but the vacant corner is never empty. As long as the Karpman triangle remains a valid model of codependent relationships in a particular situation, the participants will change roles without leaving it.
How to get out of the triangle
It is not easy to break the system, but it is possible. It only takes three deliberate steps.
1. Recognize that you are in a destructive and codependent relationship.
Determining whether you are the Victim, the Persecutor or the Rescuer is difficult for yourself. Simply because the model is changeable, and at some point all its participants feel like Victims. For example, from the position of a wife who constantly quarrels with her mother-in-law, everything is obvious: she is the Victim, and the mother-in-law is the Persecutor. But from the position of the mother-in-law, the opposite is true: she sees herself as the Rescuer of her son, who has become the Victim of a stupid wife. And you certainly won't envy your son in this triangle. As a husband, he must save his wife, accepting the role of the Persecutor in relation to his mother, as a son - to protect his mother from his wife-Persecutor, but in fact he feels himself a Victim of scandals between two women significant to him. So you can only define your role in a specific situation, having analyzed it in detail, and it is better to do this with the help of a professional. What any participant can do on their own is to acknowledge the destructiveness of the model itself and the need to change something.
2. Realize the Secondary Benefit
The wife, eternally saving her husband, who is addicted to alcohol, is afraid to be left alone and is ready to cling to the illusion of a family at any cost. The mother-in-law, who constantly quarrels with her daughter-in-law, is afraid of no longer being needed and wants to preserve a dominant place in the life of the family at any cost. The husband prefers to meet with friends in the garage, because there he feels free from the need to choose between two significant women. When a person understands what caused his actions, it becomes easier to correct his own behavior.
3. Change your behavioral pattern
It's hard to admit to yourself that you are a cunning manipulator. It is even more difficult to change the usual way of achieving a goal, but this is the only way to get out of harmful codependency. It is impossible to change someone against his will, but when one of the gears starts spinning in the opposite direction, the rest of the mechanism has no choice but to adjust. It is probably most convenient to leave the model in the role of the Rescuer - unlike the Victim, he has more resources in this coordinate system. But, in principle, the loss of any participant leads to the collapse of the system.
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