Not a victim, not a survivor. Awakened Learner

Not a victim, not a survivor. Awakened Learner

In the legal system you must present as a victim in order to win your case, or to sue. Your counsel will prep you to testify as a victim in order to affect the system, the judge, the jury.  Then you are encouraged to become a “survivor” and tell your brave story to inspire others and to help in your own recovery. There is nothing wrong with these choices, as strategies especially if you are involved with the legal system and all the recovery therapies that go with it.

What if there is another path?  One where you own the hurt, the pain, the loss and then also begin to see the lesson and growth that is occurring almost if not exactly simultaneously.  While you may have been victimized you are not “a  victim”.  You were acted against in a way that caused you pain, loss, a wound or more. And you have choices to make regarding how to defend yourself, how to react. You might need to walk away, fight, compromise, change yourself or use some combination of choices. You can also choose the perspective that what happened to you, and all of your choices and reactions to the situation can be viewed and experienced as part of the process of you being called to Awaken to a higher version of who you are via a painful or stuck experience.  In this era, it is hard to discuss this kind of approach to recovery because any attempt to look at the role of the victim in his/her own growth as an Evolving Soul will usually get you attacked for what is called victim blaming. That ends all discussion and all you are allowed to do is support the victim, his/her story and circumstances and join the band in going after the perpetrator and be called upon to endorse and expand (and sometimes publicize)the victim story. 

If you approach trauma, accidents, robbery, rape, even bombings that occur in war as an Awakened Student you take a very different approach than identifying only as “a victim”. The first step after an event or even during the situation is to make good choices regarding your own self-care. That includes everything from going to a hospital to anger expression groups, even taking medication for a while if you need it to stabilize. You vent, cry, and rage. You seek sympathy, you tell your story. All the while another part of your being begins to look at what you are learning, even while venting. Perhaps you shut down pain and this painful lesson/event is what it took to open you up, open your heart,  to  the dead spaces inside of you. Perhaps you were cold and lacking in compassion and the pain you are in now is softening your heart.  Maybe you let people run over you for so many years that the Universe finally pushed you past your pain threshold of letting that happen to you at your own expense. So the second step is beginning to comprehend what challenge you are being asked to meet, to overcome.  This means that you are simultaneously venting you emotions to take care of your human experience and taking the necessary Earth Plane actions to repair damages,  AND detaching to examine and experience what is happening to you as another step in your Evolution as a Soul with your perpetrator as your Teacher in this albeit uncomfortable and even painful and traumatic lesson.

Why take this approach? First of all, it is real. You incarnated to learn and have fun. You came here to evolve as a Soul so every scenario, let me say that again, every scenario that occurs in your life,  you created that scenario with your Guides  and arranged for it to happened, before you incarnated to come here to experience life as a human.  You created them not to punish or torture your Self but to challenge your Self to go places you beyond your current tolerance levels. That is what learning does. Takes you to places you are not. Learning does not show you what you already know.  Does this mean you “forgive” your perpetrator? Allow him or her or the circumstances to continue to “abuse” you in the name of “soul evolution”?  Hell no!  You jump into the game because only by fully participating will you learn what you set up to learn. Retaliate, react, fight, compromise, whine, roll over. You will not know what to do. You will be in the middle of learning. You might, at best, be able to apply some of what you have cultivated in your own Spiritual Practice to the situation at hand, You may not. Learning, deep learning, is a mess.

While you are participating in the event, taking care of your Self, protecting your Self, trying oh so hard to stay connected to Spirit, at the same time start listing what you are learning. Even if you write “I am learning to hate” write it down. You will not be able to figure it all out at once, especially when it is still happening and you are still in it. Just track every little thing you are learning. This will keep you out of victim falling into a perpetual victim mode(or the other side of the coin, a manic “I am a survivor” mode)  and balance you more towards mature self-care and nurturing approach while also keeping up your curiosity about what you are learning. If you swing too deeply into victim mode, you will re-write the story. You will learn to (and the system will encourage you) manipulate people and resources to take care of you further shutting down your ability to learn while also implementing self-care.  As a victim you will go into black and white thinking, good and evil, perpetrator and victim and all of that will leave you with a superficial story line and no deep learning as to why you, as a Soul, orchestrated this (horrible or painful or threatening or frightening) event in order to grow. In balance, the perpetrator, the circumstances of the event, become a mystery to be explored so you can glean all the knowledge and learning and apply it to your growth.

How did you not see “it” coming? Ask this as a victim and you are engulfed in pain. Ask this as an Awakened Learner and you are filled with curiosity and the wonderment that comes with hindsight.  Ask this as a victim and you will hold the wound and attract the lesson again until the learning and healing both occur.  The energy of the unlearned lesson will attract the lesson again, in another form, until it is learned. Every Spiritual Path, as well as mainstream psychology, notes this.  Take “the class” being offered via this painful experience and it will never happen again. And, you will be stronger, more balanced and mature which will not only improve your life but will positively affect all those in the circle of your life.

Journey On.