Winning by Losing

Winning by Losing

If you grew up receiving what psychology calls “negative attention” you have been taught that receiving love feels and sounds like being told (or shown) that you are always wrong, slow, stupid, a pain in the ass, a loser, not worth the time and energy, not loveable and never, ever, good enough. This means that as a child, you would only receive attention (and to a child, attention and love feel the same) when you were told that you were doing things wrong or that you were a loser (again). This early patterning gets imprinted in the still developing neural pathways of a child.

If you grew up receiving only “negative” attention, as an adult your way of “winning” in life, you way of feeling accepted and even loved, is to make yourself into a loser. Before you wake up and start your journey of healing, you will insert yourself into the lives of people you think matter to you, people that seem important to you and whose opinions matter to you.  You will then consistently create situations where you are the loser.  You will be the one that is “slow”, the one that “can’t be helped”, and the one with poor social skills and in this manner you will become the center of attention as the people you have chosen will try to make you feel better with complements and encouragement. As a kind of perverse side effect you also “win” because you  will prove to your chosen “helpers” (or targets)  that you are the one, the special one, that cannot be helped. By making your chosen targets (helper people) into losers too (just like you) because they failed at helping you (get out of your depression, not be slow or stupid, etc.), in your internal fantasy world you get to both be “better than them”, to be “right” that you ARE a loser and cannot be helped and you also get to (in your twisted thinking) “punish” them by showing them that they too are losers because they could not help you.  This convoluted psychological malignant twister is hard to catch and identify, and typically is impossible to discuss because there is no real way to “prove” this is going on. And people who live like this don’t see it as a twisted perverse of attention seeking and punishment behaviors. After all, you think, I am the wounded one, not the mean one, but believe me, like a cornered wounded animal will do anything to hurt you if it feels threatened, the walking wounded humans are as bad or worse than a wounded animal when it comes to their ability to dish out retaliatory punishments in the name of  “I am a victim”

When you are “targeted” by someone who needs to “win” by being the world’s greatest loser and proving they are the most hopeless case, you will find yourself being written into his/her story as the perpetrator because you are letting him/her down….. again….just like everyone else has done. However the story that will be “told” is “S/he really tried to help me. I am just too much of a hopeless case”.  You as the “helper” person will not be able to point out this dysfunctional behavior because if you do, you will be seen as mean, uncaring, and victim shaming..  If you are the helper person, caught unawares, you will find yourself chasing after this self-proclaimed “loser victim” desperately handing out encouragement, motivational speeches, sometimes free services and more because you don’t want to be added to their “list” of  here is  yet another person that couldn’t help me. In the meantime the person who targeted you is getting showered with attention, by you the helper person, as you have been seduced into believing their story “no one can help me because I am too stupid, slow, old, damaged”, etc. The “loser victims” are thriving because they have created a maelstrom of attention  for themselves while the helper person who has been targeted (and who might still has a trigger point on all of this) runs out of gas. It can and often does become a parasitic relationship. This “routine” also has the added benefit for the “loser” that  as the chosen “helper” person starts to work harder and harder, the “loser” starts to work less and less because all their efforts are focused on “proving” that they are (once again) a failure. If the “loser” person does any work at all, with careful questioning you will discover that they do the work given to them the “wrong” way thus not getting any results (proving they are “right”  and that you too, as a helper are a loser because you cannot help them). If you question the “loser victim” about their choices and actions in how they did the work you gave them to do, to  help them,  you will be told “ Well I am slow and I guess I failed…. again”. “Loser victims”  will refuse to ask you questions in order to succeed with the work they are doing with you. Instead they will  find a way, usually a clever way that actually reveals they are indeed quite smart and not “slow” at all, to do the work assigned in a way that will bring about  the results of them  “failing”. This will (typically, at least at first) win them another round of attention from the “helper” who will (usually) try to again to help this poor, slow, “loser” learn how to follow simple instructions to be able to do some work on themselves in order to heal.  The “loser victim gets their reward by gaining hours, sometimes weeks of more attention.

If you are in a helping profession and become a target of someone who thrives only on negative attention how can you recognize this dance? It is difficult. First off, listen carefully to the stories. You will notice how so very carefully details of victimhood, of being stupid, slow or damaged beyond repair, are missing. The stories will be generic and sparse and this works well for our professional “loser” because most over-givers and helper type people will quickly “fill in the details” with their imagination in their willingness to be helpful. Press for information on what is working in his/her life and you will get the same generic answers where nothing is great, some things are okay or good “I guess” usually followed with a big sigh. Start asking questions to get details, specifics,  but you will not get information (another sure sign, a red flag) instead you will get deflection, or attacked, or some kind of dramatic emotional display. What you will not get, is details. Because details, specifics, are real and if the person is a professional loser, they have learned to spin each encounter, each story,  to make themselves the star player as “the loser”.  If you as the helper do manage to discover details of the loser’s current life you discover the loser’s life is not in fact so terrible (and in fact you typically discover they have a great deal going for them). The loser will hide the details or try to shade them to accent and emphasize the “terrible” in order to not lose of the intensity of the attention they are seeking to get out of you. 

If you are recognizing yourself in this article as the player which eventually becomes the role of being a professional loser and you wish to break out of this cycle, what do you do? First off I have never seen someone give up this system of attention seeking willingly; it works too well and there is an never ending supply of people to manipulate to get your negative attention meaning if one person doesn’t help you or gets burned out, there are literally thousands more of available “helper” people you can go and get your dose of “negative” attention. And people typically don’t willingly give up a system that is working well for them in getting attention and whatever else they want from not only helper people but also with their spouse and even (sadly) manipulating their children in order to receive the attention they crave and need. However if you are one of the rare ones who wants to not only heal yourself but also wants to take on the responsibility of undoing what you handed down to your children (the dysfunctional professional loser lifestyle) you can try to make some changes.  Start with giving details and specifics, not only to helper people but also to yourself in your inner conversations. Force yourself to write out the exact details of something that you think proves you are a loser.  You will then be able to start training yourself ( and creating new neural pathways) to learn to see both sides of what is going on instead of just the side of the story that you habitually manufacture; your story that you are the sad sack slow out of it untalented hopeless case loser.  Another thing you can do is (gasp) ask directly for attention and help instead of manufacturing stories and situations where you appear as the professional loser in order to indirectly manipulate people into giving you attention and helping you. If you do this you will suffer some loss. You will have to give up your story that you are such a sad sack and a loser you cannot even ask for help.  I am being optimistic when I make these suggestions.   More realistically, people who live with functional dysfunction (such as functional alcoholics) do not give up their dysfunction until they hit bottom, and everyone’s bottom is different.  And it is hard to hit bottom when instead you can just move on and hit up another (new) “helper” person with your stories of being a woeful loser.

Thankfully I have seen this archetype even among the students who study with my own Teacher, and over 35 years the only changes I observed happening for those committed to being a "loser" was that they (finally) became accepting that this life, no matter how “good” things were for them in this life, was simply a disappointment was never going to “make” them happy. As if “life”  “makes” you happy.  I say thankfully because if I had not been exposed to this personality type I might have exhausted myself trying to “help”.  It helped me to accept that if all my own Teacher could bring to this personality type was some peace and acceptance of their life and the acceptance that some people can only be happy by being sad, being a loser (in their mind), that might be as good as it was going to get for them in this life. The old saying comes to mind, you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make her take a drink. You cannot force or “make” people want to heal. Sometimes even dramatic life circumstances cannot break through this barrier. We are here to do our own work as a soul living through this human experience we set up for ourselves. Perhaps some people come here to experience prolonged depression, discouragement, self-hatred etc. and even though we can diagnose this via childhood experiences,  it might be that the soul’s desire is to live a life filled with the emotions and experiences of hopelessness and helplessness. And all the “healer” type people will be challenged in their own work to let this choice be okay.

Journey On