Victims and True Feelings

Victims and True Feelings

What is the difference between being a victim and feeling like a victim?  One is identifying as a victim and making decisions from that base as a way of life. The other is going into the wounds of whatever happened to you where you were a victim, feeling those feelings, exploring them, processing them and allowing them to be released, taken from you all as a part of the journey of healing.

What healing looks like: Waking Up, coming out of denial.

You finally admit you were hurt, abused, abandoned, raped, lied to, robbed, beaten up and that yes, it hurt. Yes there was terrible fear and a loss of self, a loss of faith, depression, anxiety, and so much more. This stage is shocking and hurts. Your ego is demolished as you finally “cave into” the realizations and emotions that emerge as you face the truth about what happened to you instead of minimizing it, explaining it away, or muscling through it.

Grieving, raging and learning

You will inevitably need to move through the grief cycle in order to find hope and healing. This process can take two years and longer. Many people will not understand that you are grieving since you haven’t lost anyone to death.  This process is not linear. It twists and turns through loops that overlap, moves forward, and then falls back again. Give yourself the time and compassion you need to get through this part of healing. It is a dark, quiet stage where there seems to be no movement forward from the outside. It takes a long time and feels suffocating. It’s cramped, and everything in you is undergoing major changes in how you think, feel, and what you believe. But just because you can’t see the transformation taking place, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. This hard stage is where the most painful, most miraculous stuff is actually taking place.

You will also begin to have the craving to learn everything you can about your experience. Compared to five years ago, the resources available on the subject of emotional abuse have exponentially multiplied as victims have finally started to come out of the woodwork to expose and leave behind their abusive relationships. This is GOOD NEWS for you! Not only are there excellent books on this subject, but there are several incredibly helpful and educational blogs and YouTube videos out there. As you learn and grow, you will shed old belief systems that kept you deceived and trapped.

Brave New World

If you’ve ever seen a butterfly work to get free, you will know that it isn’t always easy and it takes time and effort.  You’ll learn about healthy boundaries and apply them, letting others know you are capable of making new and healthy decisions for yourself. This stage would not be possible without all the other previous work of coming out of denial, grieving and making an effort to learn new skills. This stage is one of the most difficutl. It’s where you take all the things you’ve learned and integrated into your life, and you bring it all to bear on this last effort to break free. Your old life struggles to keep you trapped. You will find yourself terrified to try the new behaviors you have studied to learn and you will feel lost as all the old signposts of abuse, fear, anxiety are gone. You will find that all your old coping and survival skills are outdated, useless and you will have to apply the new skills you have read or heard about. That will take courage. This is the stage that people often make a U-turn and run back to their old wounded behaviors. Those that do retreat, some make it back quickly, some repeat the lesson, again.

What NOT Healing looks like. Living like a Victim

You refuse to ever admit you were victimized, that you were abused, hurt or suffered. Many people confuse admitting their feelings with “being a victim” rather than realizing admitting your feelings is absolutely the first step in healing. Instead, you present a brave public face. You never discuss what happened or you present it all as if it is okay and you are fine. You shut down your emotions and muscle through each day presenting yourself as what you imagine to be a “normal” person. You have to guess at normal because you are not “normal”, not yet. If you have been brutalized, abandoned, abused emotionally, physically, or sexually, you are not normal, you are the walking wounded. Yes you may be functional but that is not healed, that is “getting through it”.

When you made the decision to shut down you learned and applied those learned  skills in order to numb out your emotions and your thinking process, and to keep consciously convincing (fooling) your loved ones and those around you that “you are fine”. You smile whenever you are sad or scared. You lie about… well everything. That becomes second nature. You isolate when you cannot smile or lie. You hurt everyone around you by refusing to let them too close to you because they might “discover” the “real” you.  You constantly make decisions that sabotage yourself rather than risk more loss and pain. Your standard operating procedure become that you consistently decide to jump off the cliff into the shark infested waters before someone pushes you. And all you know is that you WILL be pushed (and hurt), over and over again. After a while, you don’t even realize you are doing these defensive, protective behaviors. They become “you”, who you “are”. At least that is how you perceive it.

So now you are living as a victim, convinced that it (everything and everyone) will always hurt you. You are convinced that there is no way out so it is better to make decisions to suffer as a way (a dysfunctional way) to control the pain rather than risk feeling hope, or worse, love.  Because you are sure that you will be hurt, you cannot ask for support like a healthy, balanced mature person. Instead you manipulate people into caring for you (by appealing to their fear or guilt) when you threaten to step off the cliff (again) and then only because of their (desperate) insistence will you accept help. Help others are convinced they need to do because you are threatening to jump, to make decisions or take actions to hurt yourself  rather than being able or willing  to ask for help.  You isolate, and those that love you or care for you have to chase you, rather than you being able to ask for some alone time because it would replenish you. You will create arguments where you appear to be the bad guy, then use that as an excuse to skulk off into some corner to lick your wounds rather than risk asking for support or for some down time.

All of these behaviors (and so much more) are the signposts of an un-healed victim.  Feeling like a victim, declaring those feelings, having a pity party, are all healthy and necessary steps to take ANY TIME you get hurt.  Feeling your feelings, expressing them, sharing them, taking alone time or asking for support regarding your hurts or fears are all part of recovery and healing.

Shutting down your feelings and lying about how you feel means you will be manipulating, isolating, controlling, and in general, acting like a victim  by constantly making decisions and taking actions that are not beneficial and sometimes are even harmful to you means you are living as a victim. You now have internalized what was done to you . Because of your unhealed pain you are re-enacting your pain over and over and over again because it is all you can handle, all you can endure, and in fact all you know to do now in life—use the unhealed pattern of getting hurt as a way to live your life, make decisions, and behave as if it is going to happen again because you are convinced that it will. What is not brought to consciousness cannot be healed. What you bury will control you. Until the pain grows to the point you can no longer survive.

Feel like a victim. Feel sorry for yourself. Express it. Ask for help, receive support. Or, bury it and you WILL find yourself recreating your hurt, abandonment, fear, self-loathing, sexual abuse and disregard, over and over again and continue your path as a victim for real.

Journey On

Private Sessions with Dr. Marie @MarieFeuer.Org