00:00

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 250, "Being a Victim." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living.

00:21

Alright, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast. So glad to have you here with me today. A couple of things. I'm recording this a couple of weeks out but the day that this comes out is going to be the last day that my mastermind classes will be available to sign up for on my website, tanyahale.com. So if you are interested in either of those, head to tanyahale.com, click on the "mastermind" tab at the top, and you can see that I have two masterminds available: one is called "Better Relationships" and one is called "Life After Divorce." And if you're not familiar with what a mastermind is, it is a group where we come together and we just talk deeply about topics and we dive in and we figure things out, and we help you understand things at a level you haven't before so that you can apply and hopefully have some "aha"s that will shift the trajectory of your life. I have loved every mastermind I've been a part of and I'm excited to have two more starting up and they start on Wednesday. It will be Wednesday night for the next six weeks, so if you are interested in that, head to my website and check that out.

01:33

Also, just a quick thank you. Thank you for sharing this podcast with people that you feel like this kind of content. It makes a big difference. The reason I do this podcast, and the reason I do this work, is because coaching has played such a significant role for me in my growth and my progress. I look at the life I'm living now compared to the life that I was living before coaching, and it's not even comparable. I look back and I don't even recognize that person. And not that I was a bad person or an unhappy person. I was happy, but I did not understand the things that I understand now and I didn't feel as powerful to be able to create the change in my life by creating the relationships that I want. And that's been the biggest shift for me and so I love to be able to share this information here on the podcast and in things like the Mastermind Group. So just thank you for sharing. Thank you for leaving reviews. Thanks for showing up every week. I love getting to share this content with you.

02:44

Alright, so today, number 250, how in the world? 250 podcasts. That's a lot of talking. Thanks for listening, but here we are. We're talking today about being a victim. So you know what's super easy to do? To be a victim. And because it's easy, we all go there from time to time and it's easy because it's a very natural go-to for our primitive brain. Long term, we rarely like the consequences of being a victim, but the primitive brain isn't concerned with long term. It only cares about right here, right now, and that means not having to think too hard, not having to take responsibility, not having to really do anything. Primitive brain is only concerned with avoiding pain and protecting us from anything that could be painful right now.

03:38

So along with this, it's super easy to go into victim mode because blaming other people is so darn easy. It seems to be a social pastime these days. You know how as women in the 70s and 80s, we were socially conditioned to always stay small and quiet to keep the peace? I believe today we are similarly being socially conditioned to blame other people for all the ills in the world and in our lives. We see it everywhere. And this is a natural tendency for our primitive brain and it's kind of being fed some super vitamins by US culture, I think. Being a victim shows up with us deflecting responsibility for the challenges in our lives to someone or something else. Now, I'm absolutely not saying that we don't have real difficulties. We all have challenges and circumstances that come into our lives that are difficult and sometimes feel bigger than we are. And of course we see them and we feel them. That's what we're supposed to do. And often when they're especially big, we even need to slow our pace, maybe even stop. Put our hands on our knees and try to slow our breathing so we can catch our breath. And that might even be accompanied by a good cry and a bit of a pity party while we wrap our brains around what's going on. Those types of things are absolutely appropriate, but not forever. If it goes on too long, we go from someone going through something tough to starting to be a victim.

05:17

Now I get it. Nobody likes to be told that they're a victim, but the reality is most of us go there occasionally. We might start off just catching our breath and letting the sting of the situation settle down, but then it keeps going. We stay stopped. We keep finding reasons not to start moving forward. We allow ourselves to give up the power over our lives to create what we want to create. And then we start to feel stuck. We start to think that the reason we are where we are is because of the circumstance, because of someone or something else. And the reason we can't move out of this place is also because of someone or something else. I see this sometimes with my divorce clients. Maybe their spouse is the one who just up and filed for divorce and left her confused and shocked and not understanding how this all came about. Or maybe their spouse had an affair that came out of the blue and now they're flailing their arms wildly trying to get their balance and figure out what to do next. Tough stuff? Absolutely. I'm not here to deny the difficulty or make light of these very real challenges. When tough things occur, we for sure need to take some time to wrap our heads around it, to feel it, and process the difficult emotions ,and maybe even get some help if there was some abuse or trauma that occurred along the way. But then we seem to naturally hit a point where the pain starts to morph into an unsettled discomfort. A place that now doesn't feel good. It feels like we're stuck. We feel like we're spinning in place and unable to create anything new. There might still be pain, but it starts to get overshadowed with discomfort, a feeling of restlessness, and we start to feel powerless in this place. And this is when we have the choice to start moving through our challenges or to allow ourselves to slip into victim mode.

07:18

So author David Emeril says, "victims may be," check out this list, "victims may be defensive, submissive, over accommodating to others, passive aggressive in conflict, dependent on others for self-worth, overly sensitive, even manipulative. They're often angry, resentful, and envious, feeling unworthy or ashamed about their circumstances." Okay, wow, right? That covers so many difficult feelings and behaviors. This same author attributes all of these different reactions to "the death of a dream," he calls it, the loss of a belief or even the loss of our identity. And it's a loss in our lives that when we are in this victim thinking, we feel powerless to work against. Now, only in rare circumstances are we really powerless, but the thoughts that we have can feed the illusion that we are powerless. There is something in our lives that seems more powerful than us that we give power to. And that becomes our villain. The villain in our story, whether it is a person or a circumstance or a belief holds us hostage. It makes us believe that nothing will change without them or if it's a circumstance changing first. And we sometimes feel that we may as well not even try because it won't do any good. As long as there's a villain in our story, we give up our power. And this one is so tricky because it doesn't seem like a choice. In this space, we will become hyper-focused on what has happened and really believe that we are stuck unless those things that happen change.

09:20

But it's really important to realize that it's just a story, something made up in our brains. It's our primitive brain wanting to protect us from more pain and avoid expending energy by doing something like taking responsibility. So most of the clients I work with have found themselves in this space, a place where they feel stuck and powerless to do anything about it. But also they hit a point where they're done with being there and they know intuitively that it's time to move. And that's why they eventually call me and set up a consult because they're like, "listen, I can't be here anymore, but I don't know how to get out."

09:59

So one thing that I want to be clear about circumstances are real. I'm not making light of any difficult circumstances. What we're looking at today is our response to our circumstances and our thoughts about our circumstances. Notice that when our responses to our circumstances are fear, that we are much more likely to get stuck in victim-thinking. The fear triggers our primitive brain to go into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. The fear is huge and none of these, the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn has us showing up with a belief in our power and an ability to figure things out. Someone who becomes a victim tends to shut down and stop trying. And why would they try when they feel they're powerless? There have been studies done on rats where after so, so many times of feeling powerless, they just shut down and they just don't even try anymore. It's a natural tendency.

11:07

So to better understand the victim thinking we're talking about today, we have to understand the role of the villain better. And we're the ones that create the villain, not the villain, right? So a villain in a story is the one who we blame for the circumstance. Notice the word "blame." When we blame, we are putting the responsibility on someone else, but not just the responsibility for what happened. In how we're talking about it today, it's important to see that we are also putting the responsibility on someone or something else to fix it. Because as we've talked about, thinking we're a victim renders us powerless to fix it ourselves. So we sit and we languish and we get caught in "poor me" thinking. We figuratively sit down in a corner and cry and wait for someone to come and save us. But this is work that nobody else can do. We have to do it for ourselves. We have to be the ones to pick up our power and grow and progress and create a way to move out of being a victim to our circumstance. Well, a person without power would say things like, "I can't do anything about it." A person with power will say, "I can do something about it. I'm going to do something about this," and they will start to ask questions such as, "so now what? What's the next step? How can I move forward? How can I get out of this? What can I do about this?" Rather than just focusing on the problem and the villain, this person will start to focus on the solution. Notice that this person isn't looking for a rescuer, someone else to come in and fix the problem. This person looks to themselves to figure it out.

13:05

And it's not that we don't appreciate or even want to have people in our lives who love us and who help us. It's because being a victim is all in our own mind and no one else can get in there and change what we're thinking. If someone does come in and change the circumstance and rescue you, you're thinking about it hasn't changed and you still feel powerless because you're not the one that fixed it. Somebody else is. You've shifted who has the power but you haven't shifted the power to yourself. And then ultimately you will start to resent this new person for keeping you in a victim state: a place where you feel powerless. This new person then in your head becomes your new villain because they've left you powerless, or you've allowed yourself to still be powerless. People innately don't like to feel powerless. Just take a look at the feisty two year-old who pushes back against not getting to choose their clothing or brush their own teeth. We like to feel empowered with our own life. Look at the teenager who feels their parents have all the power and don't have a say in their lives. They push back and they become rebellious. As humans, it's in our DNA to want to have power over our own lives, our choices, and our ideas. And when that is given up, even somewhat voluntarily, we want to push back even if that pushback is only creating resentment in our head. A powerful tool that I use with my clients to help them step out of victim mode is to...we remove the victim from their story. Now, not necessarily their past story. Say their spouse had an affair, that's just a fact. That fact is going to be there. But we have to move them out of our story. We don't let them have any more screen time than they've already had. For example, I can look back at my divorce and see when I was in victim mode by seeing how big of a role I let my previous spouse have in my then current story. Someone might have asked me how I was, and if I went on a journey of telling them all the horrible things that were happening to me at his hands, if I recounted all of my woes and frustrations, who was the main character in my story? He was. He was still in my story. He was still the villain. And if there's a villain, there's a victim. And that victim in this case was me. To get out of being the victim, I have to get rid of the villain in my story.

15:51

Now, my previous spouse was still around. He was still a very important part of my children's lives, and I'm glad for that, right? I want him in that role. But when I told my story, I learned how to leave him out of it. Figuratively, if I'm thinking about a movie, right, he became the person's stocking shelves in the grocery store in just one small scene of my movie: my story. The plot didn't revolve around him. The cameras didn't spend extensive time following him around and chronicling in his activities. The story became about me. I was the main character. "How am I doing? Really great. Here are the things I'm working on right now. Here's how my kids are. Here's how my work is going." See, if there's no villain, then there's no victim. And in the absence of both of those, there is only a hero left to figure out the rest of the story. And this hero has the power to make things happen, to move the plot forward, to find solutions for problems that arise.

16:55

Victims see problems, heroes see solutions. And this doesn't happen from a change in circumstance. It happens from a change in thinking, a change in what I am choosing to focus on. Was my previous spouse still showing up in the same way he always had? Yep. But I stopped looking at him as a villain. I learned to see him as a person who was struggling just as I was in a really difficult circumstance. I learned to stop looking at him as the cause of all my problems, blaming him for all the difficulties, and started looking to myself to take the responsibility for coming up with the solutions for creating the life that I wanted. If he had to change or do something different for me to feel better, I would have been waiting a really long time because it wasn't his responsibility to do that. It was mine. Regardless of the circumstance, the power to move forward comes from shifting responsibility from them to us.

18:02

And I love how this aligns with the thought model and with understanding the power of our thoughts. So for example, my thought is: "he did this to me, I might feel helpless. I might feel like a victim." And then my action line: what do those feelings create? I start blaming, accusing, I start waiting. I start feeling sorry for myself. Right? I'll start looking around for a rescuer. But alternatively, when I think I can figure this out, the feeling that creates for me is maybe a feeling of intuitiveness, right? Like, I can do this. I might feel powerful or capable. And when I feel these kinds of feelings, I'm going to start in my action line, looking for solutions, taking responsibility, taking action to move forward. And then rather than feeling helpless, we can start tapping into our creative energy to find the solutions that are available to us. And there is always a solution available when we are willing to look and to try. But we don't look and try if we're feeling like a victim. So this is a place where we also stop focusing on our past, not because it isn't important. Our past has created who we are. Sometimes we really do need to understand things that happened and see how they impacted us. Sometimes we absolutely need to work with a counselor to process abuse or trauma.

19:35

But often our past is just that. The past life of a human. And that's never meant to be easy. It is important, however, that we really understand and accept that the past is done. We don't change it and we can't change it. We can ruminate all day long about what happened in our past. We can believe it shouldn't have happened to us. We can identify all the people who contribute to our very dysfunctional past. And we can identify how they should have done things differently. Adult kids do this all the time. Right? Like they're always figuring out ways that their parents are responsible for all this stuff. But for what purpose? Not a productive one. These things just keep us in victim thinking because none of it can be changed. Learning to make peace with our past regardless of how hurtful and horrible it might have been is such a vital piece of stepping into being the hero of your story. Choosing to focus on moving forward doesn't mean that those horrible and hurtful things were okay. It just means that we choose to step past them, to not let them decide how we show up today. It means we choose to focus on where we're going instead of where we've been.

21:06

Are there lessons to learn from the past? Absolutely. And learning from the past is part of the hero mentality. Choosing to focus on what we want, where we want to go, what we want to create, despite the challenges in our past, is the mindset of a hero. So pay attention to where you may be accepting the role of a victim in your life. There may be areas where you are amazing at being the hero, and others where you are super comfy being the victim. Just last week, while working with my coach, we identified an area where I have spent a long time languishing in victim mentality. I've been blaming and have felt powerless, and as a result, I haven't been showing up as me. I haven't been speaking up. I've been playing small and I've been building resentment because of it. Other areas of my life I've been playing big and I've been growing and I've been creating and moving forward and I feel powerful. So it's not a pervasive "all or nothing" thinking.

22:08

Courage up and look deeply into your life and see if there are places where you are super comfortable being a victim. I was so surprised to find mine and you might be surprised as well. I've been blaming others and it's kept me stuck because I felt powerless when in all reality, all I needed was some awareness, some acknowledgement and some courage. I'm figuring it out. I'm getting out of the victim mentality in that area of my life. This is the brilliance of growing up. I love it. Don't you love growing up into middle age. Okay, my friends if you would like some personal help with me, you can go to my website tanyahale.com and there is a tab at the top called "free consultation." You can click on there. You can access my calendar and you can set up a time that works for you. We can sit down for 30 minutes and chat about coaching and see if it's a great fit for you Thank you so much for being here today. I love sharing this content. I hope that was helpful and that you can see some areas that you can make some adjustments and move forward into a happier and healthier you, and happier and healthier relationships as a result. Okay my friends. I love you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Wish you all the best this week and I'll see you next time. Bye.

23:37

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!